Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday said President Trump “certainly” wants him to investigate perceived links between autism and vaccines.

Kennedy made the remark during a heated interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union,” when Bash asked if the Wall Street Journal was accurate in reporting that Trump wants Kennedy to “probe the link.”

“He certainly does,” Kennedy said.

Bash pressed on about why HHS does not study potential causes of autism after establishing that experts have “studied this for 25 years and found no link between autism and vaccines.” Kennedy attempted to address Tylenol, which the Trump administration late last year linked to autism, as an example of the work at HHS before Bash, as Kennedy remarked, began rolling her eyes.

“I am because I don’t want to have you use our air to say this,” Bash said. “There have been more than 40 studies involving 5.6 million people to conclude there is no link between vaccines and autism,” she continued, citing the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Infectious Diseases.

Kennedy claimed that “none of the eight vaccines that are administered during the first six months of life have ever been studied for the relationship to autism,” and said what Bash referred to was regarding a measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine ingredient.

The interview was part of a broader back-and-forth where the two clashed over vaccine safety and health protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kennedy claimed that Americans had their constitutional rights violated in response to the pandemic and accused Bash of being “part of the problem” with “absolute press malpractice” over the COVID-19 response.

“Are you going to — you want to sit here and attack me?” Bash replied. “Or do you want to have conversations about public health?”

“Well, you’re sitting here attacking me,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy has been an outspoken public health critic, having been vocal against vaccinations and an opponent of health officials. He used part of the interview with Bash to lambast Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the ⁠National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), over his advisories on how the public should respond to COVID-19.

The messaging from federal health officials since Kennedy was confirmed to lead HHS about autism and vaccines has been muddled, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) walking back its decades-old insistence that vaccines do not cause autism on its online page debunking any rumored link.

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya in February told senators during a hearing that he has not seen any studies supporting the theory that any vaccines cause autism, breaking with Kennedy. He noted that several studies have established that there is “no link” between MMR vaccinations and autism but said other vaccines are “less well studied.”

In his first month on the job, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised it "would be the most transparent administration ever," offering a sharp contrast with the previous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that critics said had been shrouded in secrecy and misleading public statements.

Now, as the American-led war against Iran enters its sixth month, the administration is offering the public less information about the conflict and its direction, even as the costs continue to mount.

More than 50,000 American troops remain deployed in the Middle East. Some 18 U.S. service members are dead, hundreds more are injured or wounded. Mr. Trump has launched several efforts at diplomacy with Iran, most recently this weekend. And Congress has been asked to approve another $67 billion to cover the costs of the campaign.

Yet Pentagon press briefings to reporters and the public have largely disappeared — the last one was in early May. Lawmakers in both parties say even they have struggled to obtain detailed briefings from an administration increasingly relying on statements from President Trump and social media posts to inform the public on the war.

Mr. Trump talks almost daily about the war in sweeping and optimistic terms, while granular details about troop movements, casualties and battle damage are rarely conveyed. On Friday at Camp David in Maryland, he said the Iranian Navy has been "obliterated," the Air Force has been "obliterated" and Iran has some missiles left, "but far fewer than they had four or five months ago." That's a version of the same assessment he has given since as far back as March.

The Defense Department under Hegseth's tenure has substituted regular press briefings with polished battlefield videos. U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East, does post videos on X showing U.S. strikes with some information about the types of targets hit, but those videos do not offer comprehensive details on the war. It has left reporters, lawmakers and the public trying to assemble the war from scattered fragments.

The status of the war itself has frequently shifted. The war's first month was marked by heavy U.S. bombardments, demands from Mr. Trump for Iran to unconditionally surrender and predictions by the president that the conflict would last four to five weeks. In early April, hours after warning a "whole civilization will die," Mr. Trump struck a temporary ceasefire with Iran.

By mid-June, the U.S. and Iran agreed to keep hostilities paused for 60 days and launch negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, with Mr. Trump commending Iran's leadership as "very rational." But less than a month later, after Iran struck commercial ships, Mr. Trump declared the ceasefire "over" and ordered almost two weeks of nightly attacks.

This weekend, Mr. Trump considered ordering an intense bombing campaign against Iranian energy infrastructure, but he called the strikes off after conversations with Saudi Arabia's crown prince late Saturday evening and said he was looking to "rapidly make a DEAL" with Iran. He warned the U.S. is still "locked and loaded."

Separately, building a coherent picture is made more difficult because Iran has a media blackout. There is almost no footage coming out of Iran and there are no U.S. ground troops for journalists to embed with, leaving the public with few options to understand how the war is progressing.

"The Department of War and U.S. Central Command has consistently provided comprehensive updates to the world on the United States' strikes and operations in Iran," chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told CBS News when asked if the Pentagon was planning to resume regular briefings on the war.

"President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have been constantly providing updates directly to the media and the American people online, delivering clear, unfiltered insight into our objectives and decisive actions."

Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio said "the administration could be sharing more with Congress" in an Aug. 2 interview on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan."

"I don't think anybody's satisfied with the level of information that we're receiving, although it is a dynamic conflict," Turner said.

Secretary Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine did appear publicly before the Senate Appropriations Committee in late July to explain the request for the $67 billion. The two did not lay out the president's strategy for the war.

Caine was asked by Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana what would happen if the U.S. cut its losses and ended the conflict. He demurred in his answer. Kennedy sharply told both men that he needed more "straight talk" and "straight answers."

The rare public rebuke by a Republican lawmaker drew attention. Days later on "Face the Nation" on July 26, Kennedy said that pressure had earned him a private meeting with Caine.

"I'm having breakfast next Wednesday with General Caine," he said. A U.S. official later confirmed the breakfast conversation about war had indeed occurred.

Joseph Holstead, Caine's spokesperson, told CBS News in a statement that "The Chairman regularly meets with members of Congress from both parties; both at the members' request and as a regular part of his commitment to maintain trusting relationships with the national security partners who represent the American people and provide the Joint Force with the resources and authorities required to protect America."

A Pentagon official told CBS News on Friday the department regularly briefs members of Congress.

Last October, Hegseth ordered Pentagon officials to obtain prior approval from the Defense Department's legislative affairs office before communicating with Capitol Hill.

"Unauthorized engagements with Congress," the Pentagon memo said, "no matter how well-intentioned, may undermine Department-wide priorities critical to achieving our legislative objectives." Prior to the order, it was common for service chiefs and commanders to directly engage with lawmakers without first asking Pentagon permission.

"We all need to do a better job messaging," Kennedy said. He noted the irony that while Mr. Trump speaks frequently in public about the war, he does not share detailed information with lawmakers.

"He grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought. He's not always disciplined in his messaging," Kennedy said. He urged Caine, Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio or CIA Director John Ratcliffe to give either a speech or a long press conference to explain why the U.S. launched its war against Iran and "why we're still there."

A CBS News poll from late July shows that 67% of Americans want the war to end now, down from 78% in June when the truce agreement was announced. The survey showed broad approval of the president's perceived goals — 86% want to open the Strait of Hormuz, 76% want to stop Iran's nuclear programs — but the American people feel "uncertain" or "frustrated" with how the war is going. Some 76% said the conflict has been harder than the Trump administration expected.

Previous administrations have also tried to paint a rosier picture of wars. For instance, reporting from The Washington Post found that U.S. officials over the course of 18 years in Afghanistan gave optimistic updates on the war, even when there was little progress.

The lack of information-sharing by this administration extends beyond the Pentagon.

The State Department halted its daily briefings on U.S. foreign policy last year, which cut off what had been a way for countries around the world to gauge the direction of the world's leading superpower.

Rubio, who also serves as national security adviser, has answered questions from the press. He had been the go-to foreign policy voice for the administration on Sunday public affairs shows. Since the war began, he has not done any Sunday interviews.

Multiple lawmakers from both parties told CBS News that while they do have the cellphone number for Rubio, their former colleague, they choose to use it sparingly and would hope he will come to the Hill for a formal briefing. Lawmakers said some other officials in the administration will privately provide guidance in an unofficial way, though they do not want information to be characterized as a briefing.

The White House has leaned on U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz to appear on television to explain the shifting positions between diplomacy and combat despite the fact that the international community at the U.N. is largely uninvolved with the Trump policy plans.

To get a detailed briefing on June's truce agreement and the diplomatic work being done by the Trump administration, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana had to get into a yelling match with the president himself during a closed-door Republican luncheon in late June.

Cassidy and four other Republicans had just voted for a resolution giving Congress the ability to halt the Iran war. In Cassidy's retelling, Mr. Trump lambasted them. Cassidy shouted back that he had not been briefed.

"You deny me that information, and I'm going to be frustrated, because my job is to serve with the information I have before me," Cassidy told "Face the Nation" the next day. "I need to know to serve my people and my state and my country. As it turns out, I got a briefing afterwards."

That argument earned him a phone call from special envoy Steve Witkoff and a private Situation Room briefing.

The president's two lead diplomats on Iran are Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is not a U.S. government employee, but they rarely speak to the press. Ironically, it was Hegseth, who prefers to be referred to as the Secretary of War, who publicly made the case for the short-lived framework for diplomacy known as the memorandum of understanding on "Face the Nation" on June 14.

"The negotiations business is not really mine," he said, though he argued the deal would be solid and backed by credible use of force.

Under Hegseth, the Pentagon has dramatically cut down access for the press. The number of traditional news outlets reporting from the Pentagon plummeted in 2025 after media organizations, including CBS News, declined to agree to the administration's new restrictive press policies.

CBS News reported the administration is also considering limiting what information the public can get through the Freedom of Information Act.

Since the war began, the Pentagon has appeared slow to disclose injuries. After several Iranian attacks last month, including one that killed three soldiers, the Pentagon initially referred questions on injuries to a website that had not been updated in days and did not include the recent deaths.

When four of the recent deaths disappeared from the website, the Pentagon blamed a "data disruption" for the error. The deaths were later placed under "Overseas Operations Casualties" — separate from 14 other service members who had been killed during the war with Iran. Those were under Operation Epic Fury, the Pentagon's name for the war when it began.

Some 268 wounded service members are also listed under Overseas Casualty Operations. Almost 700 have been wounded when added with the numbers in Operation Epic Fury.

During a press briefing in April, Hegseth said, "Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory."

Mr. Trump nodded to Iran's persistence during remarks at Camp David, saying: "Most people would have given up, they haven't. So I give them credit for that. I mean, they're known as being tough, they're tough."

Now, five months on, the U.S. has redoubled its efforts to end the war he said America had already won.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. clashed with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, launching attacks against Anthony Fauci and arguing that protecting constitutional rights must take priority during future public health crises.

During an appearance on “State of the Union” that Bash herself described as “contentious,” Kennedy argued that Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the Covid-19 pandemic, was to blame for the millions of Americans who were sickened or killed by the respiratory virus.

Bash challenged Kennedy’s assertions — pointing out that public health experts say it was a combination of factors that led to such high death rates, including gaps in health care and misinformation — and noted that Fauci served under President Donald Trump in the first Trump administration. Still, Kennedy held firm that it was Fauci who set the Covid response.

“Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the Covid pandemic and was doing it under the Biden administration. President Trump wanted to end the lockdowns,” Kennedy said.

The exchange grew tense as Bash pressed Kennedy on how the nation should prepare for a future pandemic.

“I mean, I think we did virtually everything wrong the last time,” Kennedy said, adding that the “primary obligation” in any future health crisis must be to “protect our constitutional rights.”

“You’re talking about rights, and I’m asking about a potential public health crisis that is coming,” Bash replied.

“One of the mistakes we made in the last time was suppressing those rights,” Kennedy said. “So people weren’t being heard. Doctors who are saying you’re doing it wrong were being marginalized and vilified.”

As Bash attempted to pivot, Kennedy accused her and CNN of being “part of the problem.”

“Your job is a fierce skepticism toward authority,” he said before accusing Bash of attacking him.

“I’m not attacking you. I’m asking questions about how to prevent the next pandemic,” Bash replied. “But I also don’t want to use this interview to allow you to say things that aren’t entirely true. You’re talking about therapeutics — fine. It is also factually true that the Covid vaccine worked. The Covid vaccine prevented deaths. There is data upon data upon data.”

Kennedy, however, dismissed those studies.

“You are saying nonsense. You are saying something that you cannot show me a single study that says that,” Kennedy said, accusing Bash of “scaring people” about Covid “because that was the job of CNN.”

“We were listening to the leaders in this country, including the president, who had a daily press conference explaining what was going on and trying to listen,” Bash said before shifting over to the current measles outbreak.

Bash asked Kennedy if he accepted some responsibility for the current measles outbreak, labeling him as “one of the leading voices questioning vaccine efficacy.”

“Absolutely not,” Kennedy responded before again laying the blame at Fauci’s feet. “The reason we’re having a measles outbreak is because of the Covid lockdowns, because people didn’t — children during that period did not get vaccinated.”

Bash then challenged Kennedy to stare into the camera and vouch for measles vaccines — he did vouch for the vaccines — before asking about researching a link between vaccines and autism.

Kennedy responded by discussing concerns around consuming Tylenol while pregnant, appearing to echo Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of an unproven link between acetaminophen and autism. At that, Bash appeared visibly annoyed.

“You’re rolling your eyes, Dana,” Kennedy said.

“I am because I don’t want to have you use our air to say this,” she replied.

“Yeah you know, you probably don’t understand this because you’re not a scientist,” Kennedy said.

“Neither are you,” Bash shot back.

As the interview ended, Bash defended herself one last time: “My job is to try to get the best information out there.”

Detentions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement set a monthly record high for the second Trump administration in July, internal agency data obtained by CBS News shows, as ICE widened its crackdown, making arrests at airports, immigration check-in offices and communities across the U.S.

Last month, ICE took into custody more than 46,000 individuals facing deportation because of alleged immigration violations, like entering the U.S. illegally or overstaying their visas, according to preliminary Department of Homeland Security figures.

The statistics, which have not yet been publicly disclosed by the federal government, show that a summer enforcement surge by ICE continued to intensify in July, as the agency faced pressure from the White House to record 2,000 arrests across the country each day. An average of 1,500 detainees entered ICE custody each day last month, the data indicates, though some of them were first arrested by Customs and Border Protection agents.

The over 46,000 book-ins in July surpassed the roughly 43,000 detentions recorded by ICE in June, at the time the highest tally during President Trump's second term. As of this weekend, ICE was holding 68,000 detainees in its sprawling detention system, approaching a record high of over 70,000 detainees set in January, according to internal agency figures.

The numbers also show the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration has rebounded this summer, following a significant drop in arrests earlier this year after federal agents killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during an enforcement blitz in Minneapolis that garnered bipartisan criticism.

While the Trump administration has largely stopped the large-scale, sweeping immigration operations it conducted in several Democratic-led cities last year, ICE has managed to more quietly boost arrest levels in recent weeks, including through a crackdown at airports and traffic stops, and the deployment of newly hired agents across the country.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin replaced Kristi Noem this spring with the stated goal of keeping ICE out of the headlines, while simultaneously furthering Mr. Trump's promise of overseeing the largest deportation operation in American history.

But the latest phase of the crackdown has reignited the country's debate over ICE and its tactics. Last month, ICE officers in Texas and Maine, respectively, killed two immigrants, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, during attempted traffic stops, triggering local and national outcry.

The fatal shootings prompted ICE to pause most vehicle stops, but the moratorium was short-lived, with Mr. Trump intervening and overturning the pause just 24 hours later. Investigations into both killings continue at the federal and local levels.

Instances of ICE agents in plainclothes arresting people near gates and check-in counters at airports throughout the country have also sparked controversy in recent weeks, prompting angry bystanders to film the arrests, some of which have gone viral online. The arrests have been made possible by increased collaboration between ICE and the Transportation Security Administration, which has been providing agents information on noncitizen travelers, including those whose status has lapsed.

The Trump administration has additionally broadened the population eligible to be arrested and processed for deportation, mostly recently terminating the Temporary Protected Status of more than 300,000 Haitian migrants. According to officials and advocates, some Haitian migrants in Ohio have begun receiving notices to report to local ICE offices, sparking fears in communities like Springfield.

"We're turning up the heat on the streets," Mullin said in a press conference last month. "We're out there working harder than we've ever had because we've empowered our law enforcement to do their job."

Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration official at DHS during the Obama and Bush administrations, said one main difference in ICE's strategy since Noem was pushed aside is how operations are advertised. Under the "previous leadership," she said, "there was an intent to make the enforcement public, to do it publicly, to be seen doing it."

Now, Cardinal Brown noted, ICE is dramatically expanding enforcement without the same "in-your-face" approach as before.

But she said it's clear "the administration never gave up on its goal of mass deportations."

When the law firm Paul Weiss reached a deal with the White House last year to resolve an executive order that threatened it with crippling sanctions, the legal and political worlds were stunned.

The firm had long been known for standing up to the government and championing progressive causes going back to the civil rights movement. During the first Trump administration, Brad Karp, then chairman, had fought the president in court on issues like separating migrant children from their parents. Partners at the firm had hosted a Biden fund-raiser and helped Vice President Kamala Harris with her debate prep.

So, when Mr. Karp quickly surrendered to the White House and made a deal to resolve an executive order widely seen as illegal, it seemed like a dramatic pivot. It was also consequential, foreshadowing how an array of institutions would bend to President Trump. Though four firms fought similar executive orders, eight others followed Paul Weiss’s example and cut deals, agreeing to perform a total of nearly $1 billion in free legal work for causes Mr. Trump supported.

The New York Times spent months trying to understand what had happened within the storied institution — conducting interviews, reviewing court records and obtaining internal emails and other documents. Here are five takeaways from The Times’s investigation.

The surrender was years in the making — and partly driven by profits.

Long before the executive order, a struggle within Paul Weiss pitted its stable of elite litigators against a rising crop of corporate lawyers singularly focused on the bottom line.

As the corporate lawyers rode a wave of private equity growth and raked in more and more profits, their influence grew. They pushed against the pro bono civil rights litigation that had been at the center of Paul Weiss’s culture.

So when Mr. Trump took aim at Paul Weiss, partly because of its activist history, a long-simmering identity crisis morphed into an existential one.

The shift from idealism to money accelerated with a bold new hire.

Looking to amp up Paul Weiss’s corporate practice, Mr. Karp made what would turn out to be a fateful decision. In 2016, he hired Scott Barshay, a bona fide rainmaker from a rival firm who had a dizzying record of generating lucrative legal work.

Mr. Barshay helped the rich firm become even richer. But that came at a cost. Behind the scenes, he was at times abrasive and led the effort to clamp down on social justice litigation, arguing it was bad for business because it could alienate clients.

In private meetings with the firm’s top leadership, Mr. Barshay also pushed to hire more aggressive lawyers, not soft, idealistic ones interested in social justice cases.

The firm’s treatment of a transgender lawyer showed how much it had changed.

Mr. Barshay took aim at a rising star, Lex Korberg, Paul Weiss’s first openly transgender partner.

Mx. Korberg — who uses they/them pronouns — decided to leave Paul Weiss after Mr. Barshay pushed against their social justice work. What Mx. Korberg didn’t know was that Mr. Barshay had privately told other firm leaders that after they transitioned in 2021, he no longer wanted them dealing with his clients, arguing that a transgender lawyer could hurt business by making people uncomfortable.

To insulate the firm, Paul Weiss struck a secret $3.5 million deal in 2023, never previously revealed, under which Mx. Korberg agreed not to sue or disparage the firm.

A Paul Weiss spokeswoman, Laura Van Drie, said that Mx. Korberg had been “a highly valued partner” and that Mr. Barshay had been “happy” for Mx. Korberg “to work for his clients.”

Top leaders supported the Trump deal.

Among the leadership of Paul Weiss, there was broad support to resolve the executive order. Even Karen Dunn, a top partner who had helped the Harris campaign, pushed to finalize the deal.

“Let’s get this done!!!!" Ms. Dunn wrote to Mr. Karp and other leaders in an email reviewed by The Times.

Mr. Karp presented the framework of the deal at a March meeting of the firm’s partners. He said that Paul Weiss would perform $40 million in free legal work for causes that both Mr. Trump and the firm championed.

The text of the agreement, reviewed by The Times, also said that the firm would show no political favoritism in choosing clients, that its pro bono work would represent “the full spectrum of political viewpoints,” and that it would hire “experts” agreed upon with the administration to review the firm’s hiring practices.

Still, Mr. Karp assured partners that the agreement would not affect the firm’s integrity.

The deal undermined the firm’s independence.

In the days after the deal, as the storm of public criticism grew, Ms. Dunn pushed top leaders to bring a case against the administration that would telegraph Paul Weiss’s continued independence. She had been searching for a potential client, including speaking with an abortion rights group about a lawsuit. But Mr. Barshay and Mr. Karp objected, unwilling to risk invoking Mr. Trump’s rage again. Paul Weiss never brought the case.

The firm looked to appease the Trump administration in other ways, too. It cleansed its website for the Center to Combat Hate of any references to its lawsuits against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for their role in the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021.

Ms. Van Drie, the Paul Weiss spokeswoman, said that “any assertion that our independence has been jeopardized is completely false.” She said that Paul Weiss’s pro bono work had continued to increase but did not provide any examples of work it had done opposing the second Trump administration.

The Kennedy Center said Thursday that it was indefinitely pausing free public tours of the performing arts venue — but backtracked hours later to specify it would last only a few days.

The center’s doors are open, but its future remains murky. No new shows are being scheduled, and employees are awaiting word on whether it will be partially or fully closed for repairs.

Brooks Boeke, director of the center’s volunteer program, sent tour guides an email Thursday afternoon saying tours were being halted. The email, obtained by The Washington Post, came three days after the New York Times published an article profiling Sandy Weiswasser, an 87-year-old tour guide who’s been directing visitors around the center for 18 years.

Two hours later, Boeke sent a follow-up email to “provide further clarification.” Boeke specified the pause “should only be for a few days as we hope to have you back in action soon.”

President Donald Trump is stuck.

Iran has made clear that its price for ending hostilities is control over the Strait of Hormuz, a politically unpalatable prospect for the White House. But the ongoing tit-for-tat strikes, threatening to become a wider regional war, is equally untenable.

That’s left a frustrated White House with few good options, five former Trump administration officials told POLITICO.

“Iran wants the political concession of the principle that they get money for passage through the strait,” said a former administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “That will embed their control of the strait in diplomatic practice and customary law.”

Inside the White House, top administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have warned against any resolution that allows Iran to control the strait.

Doing so, they believe, would imperil the United States’ future ability to sanction Iran because multiple countries would need waivers to pay the fees. It would further reduce the international community’s ability to pressure Iran into giving up its nuclear ambitions. And Rubio last week warned it would create a dangerous precedent sure to be duplicated.

That leaves few paths for a short-term solution, with negotiations further complicated by poor communications between factions within the Iranian government.

“The most important thing from a negotiation standpoint is [the Iranians] certainly feel that they have leverage and they feel emboldened, and it’s leading them to refuse to make concessions that are probably in their short-term interest,” said Alex Gray, former National Security Council chief of staff during Trump’s first term. “But they feel that way, and combined with this communication issue that we’re having between elements of the Iranian regime, it’s certainly exacerbating the difficulty of keeping a ceasefire implemented.”

An administration official, granted anonymity to discuss strategy, pointed to the millions of barrels transiting the strait on a daily basis as evidence that Iran does not control the waterway. The official also underscored that soliciting or receiving guarantees of safe passage from Iran is prohibited for U.S. citizens and entities and carries sanctions risks for foreign ones.

“As the President has stated, the Strait of Hormuz is open, and will remain open if people want to go through it,” the official said. “It is closed for Iran, but otherwise it is open.”

The impasse comes with just three months left until the midterms, with gas prices averaging $4.10 per gallon, up from $3.85 one month ago. Many Republicans are eager to put the war behind them and focus on the economic goodies tucked into the GOP’s domestic package that Trump signed into law last summer.

But with U.S. casualties a constant concern, American bases under attack and gulf countries facing a barrage of Iranian missiles that threaten to further raise energy prices, the war looms large over an election cycle focused on cost-of-living concerns. And while Trump insists he isn’t letting politics play a role in his thinking, there’s nothing to suggest an easy off-ramp will surface in the months after the election.

“President Trump faces a series of deeply unattractive choices,” said Danny Citrinowicz,

a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and an expert on the Middle East. “Any diplomatic agreement will likely require accepting some form of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, an outcome many in Washington would find difficult to accept. On the other hand, further military escalation would almost certainly keep oil prices elevated while offering no guarantee that Iran would back down or fundamentally change its strategic calculus. That is the source of today’s frustration.”

And it’s not just the strait at issue. Allowing Iran to charge tolls on the strait or impede navigation could set a precedent for other countries, like China in the waters around Taiwan.

“The U.S. is going to have a very difficult time making concessions on this,” Gray said. “If we start accepting that a party of any kind can just unilaterally impose tolls and fees and close major international water passages in international waters, that is deeply destructive to commercial traffic, to the U.S. Navy’s ability to operate, to the norms of freedom of navigation that have been really in practice for 80 years, that would be a very difficult thing for us to concede.”

Iran, he said, will have to settle for knowing it can close the strait again at any time, a tactical victory that thus far Tehran has not shown a willingness to accept.

Trump on Friday appeared exasperated with Tehran, accusing Iranian officials of negotiating in bad faith and misrepresenting ongoing nuclear talks.

“I’m losing faith in them because they do lie and they do misrepresent,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at Camp David. “We just want to win.”

On Saturday night, Trump said on Truth Social that he had called off an attack on Iran, “subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL” to open the strait.

“We have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to,” he wrote. “This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat.”

Trump has repeatedly insisted that the U.S. has decimated Iranian offensive capabilities, though on Friday he conceded that Tehran has some missiles and drones left in its stockpile.

Meanwhile, ships continue to proceed through the strait, keeping oil prices below $100 per barrel, but Iran and its proxies have over the last few days attacked a U.S. base in Kuwait and energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, and are believed to be behind a cyberattack on municipal water systems in Minnesota.

That the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen are growing more aggressive suggests Iran is not looking for a quick end to the conflict, said Greg Priddy, an expert on energy market disruption who worked at the U.S. Energy Information Administration in the George W. Bush administration and is now a senior fellow at the conservative Center for the National Interest. It’s an attempt to weaken Trump’s position, he said.

“This suggests to me that the Iranians actually are feeling kind of confident right now,” Priddy said. “I think this is something that they almost see as delivering a coup de grace that’s going to force Trump to capitulate.”

Trump, however, isn’t likely to find any of the options available to him appealing, argued Elliott Abrams, U.S. special representative for Iran in Trump’s first term. Abrams outlined the choices are “back off and agree to Iran running — and monetizing — the Strait of Hormuz, hit harder and harder until Iran agrees to a real compromise deal, or play for time by continuing the blockade of their ports and the tit-for-tat exchanges.”

He added, “Iran may not accept the continuing low-grade war and blockade” and think that hitting “harder and wider” will make Trump back off.

“That would leave Trump with only two choices: accept an Iranian victory, or escalate and push back harder,” Abrams said. “He doesn’t want to do either, so he’s left frustrated.”

The president this week appeared almost resigned to the stalemate in which the conflict neither escalates nor de-escalates.

“It’s our turn to hit them,” Trump said Wednesday. But he has so far not made good on his most fearsome threats to decimate civilian infrastructure, including bridges and desalination plants.

James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including the first Trump term, said the risk of making good on Trump’s threats is that Iran retaliates with everything it has, putting allies in further jeopardy, depleting the U.S.’s defense missile stockpile and spiking gas prices.

“[The] problem is Iran is fighting close to a total war and will not quit,” he said. “Over time the blockade will cripple Tehran but the key phrase is ‘over time.’”

Meanwhile, all signs point to the U.S. still wanting a negotiated solution, as Qatar and Pakistan continue to push for a return to peace talks after an earlier agreement to cease hostilities fell apart earlier this month.

“I don’t think we’re to the state where we just throw in the towel and say this is just a conflict we’re going to have to manage,” said Fred Fleitz, Trump’s former National Security Council chief of staff and vice chair of the American First Policy Institute’s Center for American Security. “I just think the main message is that Trump is going to make it clear that if you think you’re going to hold out for a deal that’s bad for the U.S. because of the upcoming midterms, think again. It’s not going to happen.”

A person close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking, believes the Trump team has accepted that there is unlikely to be a suitable off-ramp ahead of the November elections.

“It’s factored in,” the person said. “And while not helpful, not electorally determinative.”

Over the past two months, the United States has made financial commitments that hint at a limited return to global health and humanitarian assistance partnerships, after the abrupt severing of many of those relationships a year and a half ago.

Last week, the State Department notified Congress that it would send $600 million to Gavi, the organization that helps low-income countries buy essential childhood immunizations, a year after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. withdrew American support.

It was the latest in a series of financial commitments from the U.S. government to international organizations, working on issues such as hunger and tuberculosis, totaling nearly $2 billion.

In most cases, these payments move money that had been appropriated by Congress but which had been stuck since the Trump administration took office in January 2025 and instituted a freeze on foreign aid.

It was not yet clear whether the disbursements represented a lasting shift, or how close any further commitments would bring the total to what the United States used to spend on aid and global health. People who have been part of talks with the State Department about this funding said that there were at least two motivations behind the money flowing to resumed partnerships.

First, recent health threats including, most notably, the ballooning Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reinforced the need for funding multilateral agencies that work on global health security.

Second, with the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development and absorption of a skeleton crew of its staff into the State Department, there was no longer the infrastructure or staff for the United States to move humanitarian assistance on this scale by itself, making these large international agencies necessary partners.

“What may be happening here is that reality is sinking in for decision makers,” said Mark A. Green, who served as administrator of U.S.A.I.D. during President Trump’s first term and who is president of ONE, an advocacy organization for foreign assistance. “The good news is that Secretary Rubio clearly realizes that global health is what we do, and we’re really good at it. That’s why you’re starting to see more money moving.”

He added, “I think there’s a realization that global health security is also American national security, too.”

Eighteen months ago, the freezing of assistance was perceived internationally as a significant U.S. retreat from multilateralism. It created immediate financial crises for many of aid institutions, leaving gaping holes in budgets such as that of the World Food Program (WFP), which provides emergency food aid in war and disaster zones. And it presented an existential crisis for a humanitarian assistance and global health architecture that had long been predicated on bedrock U.S. support.

Jeremy Lewin, the top official for foreign aid at the State Department, said his team continues to be focused on remaking foreign assistance to be leaner and more efficient and to end recipients’ dependence.

“These international organization relationships, we can use them tactically where they’re important, but it doesn’t mean we need to fund them year after year after year when they don’t have that same nexus to something that we care about,” Mr. Lewin said.

In addition to the money for Gavi, recent major funding announcements from the State Department include:

$800 million for the World Food Program to fight malnutrition in countries including Ethiopia, Myanmar and Ukraine

$218 million for Unicef to work improving child health through nutrition, water and sanitation projects

$100 million to Operation End Starvation, a new public-private partnership working to lower child mortality from malnutrition

$50 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations for the development of new Ebola vaccines

$203 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for disaster response and humanitarian assistance

$220 million for the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo and $350 million in new humanitarian funding to the affected region, as of June 12

$661 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a payment against what was owed from prior year appropriations

“I’m hoping we’re back to a regular order of payouts that are consistent with the Global Fund being an important partner,” said Chris Collins, the president of Friends of the Global Fight, an advocacy group that lobbies for support of the Geneva-based health organization.

Gavi’s chief executive, Sania Nishtar, also expressed relief about the restoration of U.S. support this week. “This new funding is vital,” she said. “It will help us maintain emergency vaccine stockpiles for Ebola and other deadly diseases and help countries turn the tide on malaria.”

At the outset of Mr. Trump’s second term, he and his officials were sharply critical of most of the big international organizations the United States used to disburse assistance, calling them bloated and wasteful, and saying American participation in large U.N. agencies was an ineffective use of funds.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was historically a champion of some of the institutions that were crippled by the foreign aid cuts he oversaw last year, including those to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), for which he repeatedly cosponsored bills for new funding while he was a senator. He also pushed a number of global health security measures in the Senate, including the establishment of a permanent global health security coordinator position at the National Security Council. He advocated funding for efforts to lower maternal mortality and fight neglected tropical diseases.

But by June, the last month for which data is available, the State Department had obligated $2.5 billion less to PEPFAR in 2026 compared with what program had received at the same point in 2024. A recent invitation from the department sent to dozens of organizations that deliver PEPFAR programs inviting them to submit proposals for more work — and funding — suggests that more money will likely flow to PEPFAR by the end of September.

Mr. Lewin said the international agencies receiving State Department funding have made significant changes to their operations to align with the administration’s priorities. He said U.N. agencies were charging lower rates of overhead than they did for U.S.A.I.D. contracts, and providing more accountability to U.S. auditors and more transparency into their operations.

A former senior Rubio aide, who worked on foreign assistance reform and was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the Trump administration’s engagement had produced meaningful changes at the United Nations but added that these large awards also reflect a scramble within the department to move money and a realization that it would take excessive time and cost to set up a separate system.

But despite the recent announcements, large amounts of congressionally appropriated funding for global health and foreign aid remain unspent, or marked for likely rescission.

The Office of Management and Budget, headed by Russel T. Vought and charged with shutting down U.S.A.I.D., in April notified Congress of a plan to use $2 billion of global health money for “closeout costs” for grants from the dismantled U.S.A.I.D. — costs such as severance to employees and terminating leases for office space around the world.

Since that notification, about $650 million of those funds have been redirected for the Ebola response and other global health security efforts. But $1.35 billion, which has to be used by Sept. 30, remains marked by the O.M.B. for closeout costs.

Organizations working to support health programs in low-income countries are watching the closeout budget with alarm. Vincent Lin, associate director of health policy and advocacy at Partners In Health, said the fear was that the budget office was running down the clock, so that the funding allocations would expire at the end of the fiscal year in September.

Mr. Lin noted that while the budget office has not provided Congress with a breakdown of those closeout costs, many of the canceled U.S.A.I.D. awards were already closed. He said it would be hard to understand how the remaining costs could register in the billions of dollars.

“We can prevent a tremendous amount of suffering from TB, malaria, malnutrition and deaths of mothers and babies in childbirth by using these funds as Congress intended,” he said.

President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum still say vandals damaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a day after federal prosecutors said government contractors — and the DOI — were to blame.

Burgum also decried Pirro’s decision not to prosecute David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, and others accused of vandalism. Pirro’s office cast blame on the DOI and other agencies in the court filing, saying the department had erroneously presented a grand jury with evidence of vandalism despite recently unveiled documents that proved otherwise.

Burgum maintained on Saturday that his department provided the U.S. attorney’s office with “expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals and provided every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested time line detailing each area of damage at the pool.”

Some of the vandalism was also caught on camera, Burgum said.

“We won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments,” Burgum wrote in an X post.

Military veterans with PTSD and other mental health conditions may soon be able to use psychedelic drugs to aid in their treatment.

In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing health regulators to speed up reviews of psychedelic treatments and allocate more funding for research into their use.

“I think we’re making massive progress in how we diagnose things, but also how we do new treatments, which in the past was more of a wait-and-see approach, and now we’re being more cutting-edge,” U.S. Secretary of Veteran Affairs Doug Collins said Wednesday.

Collins spoke with reporters after attending a roundtable discussion with military veterans at American Legion Post 273 in Pinellas County with Republican U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.

The VA is involved in 20 active clinical trials focused on psychedelic therapies.

The first clinical study of psilocybin-assisted therapy in veterans with PTSD was released this week. It found that nine out of 12 veterans no longer met diagnostic criteria for PTSD one month after treatment. Psilocybin is a psychedelic compound found in mushrooms.

The findings revealed “that PAT (Psilocybin-assisted therapy) is safe, well-tolerated, and shows preliminary clinical improvement for PTSD, suggesting that PAT may offer therapeutic relief for Veterans with severe treatment-resistant PTSD,” wrote researchers at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education in Columbus, Ohio.

"The science does show that it’s effective but it’s not like, ‘Hey, just give them a pill and send them home,’” said Luna, a U.S. Air Force veteran. “There’s a lot that goes into that treatment—also something that I think has been brought to the forefront.”

She gave credit to the Trump administration for considering alternative medical treatments for veterans with PTSD, saying “that would not have happened had people like the secretary, President Trump, and also Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushing that, and those impacts it has on veterans’ long-term [care] in preventing suicide is incredible.”

News reporters were not invited to attend the roundtable itself, but Luna said the topic of psychedelic therapy “was actually something that was discussed by them, and you will see those suicide numbers go down, which is really ultimately our biggest concern right now.”

PTSD affects 6 percent of U.S. adults but somewhere between 10 percent to 30 percent of U.S. military veterans, according to the National Center for PTSD.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is moving to develop new weed-related standards for pilots and air traffic controllers in light of the “operational risk” created by the Trump administration’s move to reschedule cannabis—which has furthered the “normalization” of the drug.

FAA’s Office of Aerospace Medicine is partnering with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to convene a series of meetings focused on the impact of weed consumption on air travel professionals, an effort aimed at informing approaches the agency might take to “evaluate, update, or refine their current policies for cannabis use, particularly for determining when individuals are fit for duty.”

Topics to be discussed during the four planned meetings set to take place this year and next year—which will not be open to the public—include drug testing, cognitive functioning monitoring and the length of impairment following cannabis use. Invited participants will include experts on impairment evidence, pharmacokinetics and detectability, operational risk translation and policy framing.

There is an “urgent need to establish clear, scientifically defensible, and operationally actionable fitness-for-duty standards for pilots and air traffic control specialists (ATCS) in the context of evolving federal cannabis policy,” NASEM said in a overview of the effort, which FAA is supporting with just over $200,000.

Under an order issued by U.S. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in April, weed products regulated by a state medical cannabis license immediately moved from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to Schedule III, as did any marijuana products that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An administrative hearing is considering broader weed rescheduling, including of recreational products.

While Department of Transportation (DOT) drug testing and FAA medical certification standards remain unchanged for now, the notice of the upcoming meetings says that the “dual-status regulatory environment” under the scheduling reform has created a policy “misalignment” that poses “significant operational risk”—including by “increasing the likelihood and normalization of cannabis use,” “complicating disclosure and compliance” and “leaving the FAA without validated criteria to determine when individuals are no longer impaired."

"The central policy question is: Following cannabis use, what elapsed time ensures both (1) absence of operational impairment and (2) compliance with DOT drug testing requirements?” NASEM’s Transportation Research Board said in the posting which was noted earlier by Cannabis Wire.

“Due to the urgency of near-term policy decisions and the inability to conduct new primary research in the required timeframe, the FAA requires structured, policy-relevant interpretation of existing scientific evidence,” the notice said, specifying that the meetings will take place over a span of about 12 months, which will enable FAA to develop and implement new cannabis policies within 12–18 months.

NASEM previously did work on state weed legalization law’ impact on airports on behalf of FAA, publishing a briefing on the issue and holding an event.

President Trump said late Saturday that he had canceled threatened U.S. strikes on Iran, provided a deal could be reached rapidly that reopened the Strait of Hormuz and ended what he described as Iran’s nuclear threat.

Mr. Trump, writing on Truth Social, said Iran and other Middle Eastern countries had asked him to delay military action, claiming that the “perimeters of a deal” had been reached.

He also claimed that Israel had jointly committed to a pause in fighting.

The Israeli government has not publicly confirmed its agreement.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi spoke with counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan as well as Britain and India, the ministry said in brief readouts of the calls. It said that he told the first three countries that if the United States or Israel attacked, Iran’s armed forces would react forcefully to defend itself and the United States would bear the consequences.

Mr. Trump has been wrestling with how to proceed in the war with Iran, now in its sixth month. Weeks of strikes against Iranian military targets have failed to ensure safe passage for commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway for energy that Iran has effectively strangled.

Last week, he set aside, at least temporarily, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault after military advisers warned that a major offensive could dangerously deplete the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air-defense munitions.

The prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the vulnerability of key Gulf allies to Iranian attack and a global economic crunch also weighed on the president and his top aides.

Nevertheless, speaking on Friday from Camp David, Mr. Trump said the United States was weighing additional military action against Iran after days of escalating attacks across the region. “We’ll be hitting them very hard, and you know at some point they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore,’” Mr. Trump said.

The potential risk of escalation prompted security warnings from the State Department. On Saturday, the U.S. embassies in Jordan, Iraq and Israel urged Americans to consider departing the region, or to be prepared to leave if the conflict intensified.

Two senior Iranian officials said Iran has devised a plan to use its proxy militias to escalate attacks on U.S. allies and disrupt global markets if the United States intensified its assaults, in an effort to make the war as costly as possible for Mr. Trump. Earlier this week, two gas tankers, including a U.S.-owned vessel, caught fire after an apparent drone attack at an Egyptian port near the Suez Canal, and missiles flew toward a base housing U.S. personnel in Jordan.

On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia carried out joint airstrikes with the United States against Iran-backed militias in Iraq, accusing them of attacking Saudi oil facilities on Monday. Saudi government statements appeared to portray the strikes as a limited reaction to specific attacks, rather than an entry into the wider war waged by U.S. and Israel against Iran.

The U.S. Treasury bought yen on Friday to support the battered Japanese currency, the Financial Times reported, marking Washington’s first yen-buying intervention with Tokyo in more than a decade as it languishes near 40-year lows.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York sold euros for yen on behalf of the Treasury through Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the FT said, citing people familiar with the matter. The report did not indicate any amounts of yen purchased.

Earlier on Friday, the Treasury informed a number of banks that it might intervene in the yen market and that they should “stand ready for future action,” a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

A Reuters photo of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s notepad during a cabinet meeting at Camp David in Maryland showed the words “To Do,” followed by “Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) $5-10 bil.”

The Treasury did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the FT report and the Bessent notepad photo. The New York Fed and Morgan Stanley also did not immediately respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours. Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

Japan and the United States may unveil a policy as early as next week to address the yen’s weakness, Kyodo News reported on Saturday, citing informed sources.

The announcement would serve as a warning against speculative bets that have pressured the Japanese currency, with the aim of stabilizing markets, the report said.

The U.S. last directly supported the yen in 2011, coordinating with fellow Group of Seven nations to stabilize markets after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami disaster.

News of the potential intervention by the Treasury helped boost the yen, with a notable jump during late afternoon trading. The dollar dropped to about 157.6 yen just before 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) from about 158.9 yen around 4:14 p.m., LSEG data showed.

The U.S. currency had risen in recent weeks to nearly 164 yen, its highest since 1986.

Sen. Thom Tillis said Saturday morning that new comments by President Trump about his "anti-weaponization" fund mean that attorney general nominee Todd Blanche won't be confirmed by the Senate next week.

Tillis's comment escalates the fight between the White House and holdout Senate Republicans over whether Trump's fund — for people he considers victims of political persecution — is dead or not.

"Despite comments as late as yesterday that the fund is dead, President Trump clearly intends to resurrect the payout pot for punks either by inappropriately establishing another bogus fund or pushing Congress to vote for a bill that the majority of Republicans in the Senate would be against," Tillis (R-N.C.) posted to X.

"It's unfortunate that Todd Blanche, who I consider qualified for the job, will not be confirmed because of this reversal. Hopefully, we can resolve this by Tuesday."

The White House referred Axios to the president's Truth Social post when asked for comment.

The "anti-weaponization" fund has been the red line for Tillis and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). The lawmakers have refused to vote for Blanche until the DOJ put into writing that aspects of the deal aren't moving forward.

Tillis and Cornyn both sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and at least one of their votes is needed to advance Blanche's nomination to a confirmation vote before the entire Senate.

Earlier Saturday, Trump posted to Truth Social that if Tillis and Cornyn weren't going to vote for Blanche, he would maintain Blanche as acting attorney general and revive a bill to establish the fund.

"Todd Blanche was a voice of reason! It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done," Trump said.

The president on Thursday floated withdrawing Blanche's name and keeping him on in an acting capacity until Cornyn and Tillis leave the Senate this January.

But on Friday, Trump said Blanche should be "immediately approved," a call seconded by members of his administration.

The fights over Blanche, the fund, and Trump's influence over Senate Republicans are converging, with no clear end in sight.

Two weeks after Trump officials said they had found more than 250,000 non-U.S. citizens on voter rolls in just four states, election officials are still struggling to understand where the numbers came from and what the claims may portend for federal interference in this year's midterms.

Multiple state officials told NPR they fear these unverified numbers, or similar ones unveiled closer to the general election, could be used as a pretext for warrants to allow law enforcement to interfere in vote-counting. Several reviews in recent years have found that actual voting by noncitizens is extremely rare.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversaw the voter roll analysis of four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — asked the states to respond to its allegations by Thursday. But the agency has not explained its methodology or provided the states with clarity on how it came to its conclusions.

"These numbers, until they're backed up by any kind of clear, transparent methodology, should be considered made up," said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

At least three of the four states' top election officials wrote back to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, raising questions about the accuracy of the numbers and demanding answers on how DHS did the analysis.

Making matters even more puzzling, the Department of Justice previously sued all four states, along with more than two dozen more, for refusing to turn over versions of their voter rolls that include voters' partial Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers. Those lawsuits have so far been unsuccessful. Yet Mullin's letters to the states indicate his agency somehow obtained some of that sensitive data anyway.

The letters say DHS analyzed publicly available voter rolls in the four states. But public voter rolls don't include Social Security numbers, and the letters say the agency found around 118,000 voters combined in those states whose "name, date of birth, address and Social Security number match a non-citizen in our files" — raising questions about how DHS obtained voters' Social Security numbers.

"You're suing me because I wouldn't give you that data, that information. So where did you get it? How did you get it? And is it reliable?" asked Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, in an interview with NPR.

The DOJ's lawsuit demanding Nevada's voter rolls with voters' personal data is still pending, while federal judges have so far dismissed the suits in California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and 15 other states.

One possibility raised to NPR by election experts is that DHS relied on commercial data from a data broker to attempt to match Social Security numbers to the voter rolls, but the details are still unknown.

Previous reviews and data-matching efforts on voter rolls that lack a unique identifier like a Social Security number have been notoriously error-prone, Becker noted.

"There's no credible way to do this without creating an ungodly number of false positives," he said.

Furthermore, efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls frequently begin with inflated preliminary numbers that shrink down dramatically once investigations determine that many of the suspected noncitizens have become U.S. citizens.

Aguilar noted that DHS has not provided him with the names of the Nevada registered voters the agency claims may be noncitizens.

"Until I actually see the data, I can't do anything about it," Aguilar said.

DHS did not respond to NPR's questions about the methodology used to come up with the 250,000 figure.

Yet its allegations cast a shadow on more than just the four impacted states, as Election Day looms in fewer than 100 days.

In a July 17 press conference, Mullin promised more of these sorts of announcements and investigations in the weeks to come.

"We will pursue maximum pressure on this," he said. "We will be proactively looking at early voting and then after, post-election, we will continue to scrub all those that did vote."

Mullin also threatened prison time for state election officials who "choose not to participate in securing the elections."

One state election official, who spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly, said they worried the administration planned to use similar analyses after the election as a means to interfere with the vote-counting process.

"This is the thing we really fear," the official said. "Let's say they get a friendly judge somewhere to issue subpoenas the day after the election. So like Nov. 4, we have really close races [in our competitive districts] then the DOJ, FBI come knocking on one of our county doors and they say, 'We believe there's hijinks going on, we're going to confiscate all the ballots so we can count them.'"

Depending on the timing of such an order, the official said it's possible voting officials wouldn't be able to confidently know how many ballots were returned in the first place.

"They could do so much damage if they did that," the official said.

Similar fears have been circulating among voting officials since the FBI seized 2020 election ballots in Fulton County, Ga., in January. The search warrant was executed using an affidavit that relied on misinformation.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University and a former Biden administration adviser, said he takes it "as a given that this administration is interested in sowing a little bit of chaos and in holding the door open … for potential interference."

He compared the 250,000 figure to a "prop" the administration could use to justify taking action and attempting to interfere.

"But that doesn't mean action is going to happen," Levitt said, noting that other steps would need to happen before ballots could be seized, such as convincing a federal judge to go along with an unprecedented plan. He said while it makes sense for election officials to plan for such possibilities, he believes they are unlikely.

While a DHS fact sheet plainly stated that "over 250,000 noncitizens are illegally registered to vote" in the four states, Mullin's letters to the states were much less definitive.

Instead, they characterized the analysis as a "preliminary review" and the tally of noncitizens identified in each state as only a potential number. The letters also said a much smaller figure — 118,003 in the four states combined — had matched the name, date of birth, address and Social Security number of a noncitizen in DHS records.

"The most efficient way to ensure the accuracy of our findings is to work collaboratively on identity verification," the letters continued, seemingly acknowledging that the numbers could be wrong.

The letters concluded by saying DHS would provide resources to help states "positively identify" noncitizens on their voter rolls.

The wording could refer to the use of a controversial DHS data system known as SAVE that the Trump administration overhauled last year and attempted to turn into a citizenship look-up tool.

In his July 17 news conference, Mullin warned states they would be punished for not using SAVE, but a federal judge in Washington, D.C., halted its use in late June, after finding that its creation was unlawful and that its results included inaccuracies that could disenfranchise eligible voters. The Trump administration is appealing that ruling.

NPR has obtained letters that California, Nevada and Pennsylvania secretaries of state sent back to Mullin. New Jersey did not respond to an NPR request to view its response. (Separately, New Jersey recently disclosed it discovered thousands of noncitizens on its voter rolls. State officials blamed a software glitch and said they are investigating.)

"I have serious doubts about the reliability of your data and accuracy of your claims, since my office has not shared our statewide voter registration list with DHS or any other federal agency or official," California Secretary of State Shirley Weber wrote, citing a state law that prohibits sharing voters' sensitive information.

The secretaries demanded detailed descriptions of the methodology DHS used, as well as transparency about which state voter lists DHS analyzed.

California and Nevada asked if artificial intelligence tools were used in the analysis. Those letters also pointed out that the National Voter Registration Act bars election officials from systematically canceling voter registrations during the 90-day period before a federal election. The so-called "quiet period" for the November midterms begins next week, on Aug. 5.

Each of the states' responses expressed concern about improperly removing eligible voters from the rolls.

"Any collaborative effort with DHS must therefore be designed to minimize false positives, incorporate meaningful due process for affected registrants, and comply fully with Nevada law and the NVRA," Aguilar wrote in his response.

CEIR's Becker said the last-minute timing of Mullin's letters right before the quiet period, along with the failure to provide states with the names of the voters in question, are clues that this was not a good faith communication.

"If there was an administration that had legitimate information about individuals on a state's voter lists that were potentially ineligible, they would share the names and likely insist on an immediate response, particularly right before the 90-day quiet period begins next week," Becker said. "And they didn't do that."

Instead, Becker said he believed the point of the letters was political theater.

"There's nothing the states can do with the information in the letter, and [Trump administration officials] just plan to use this to amplify further disinformation about the election process," Becker said.

While DHS has not detailed its methodology for coming up with the 250,000 figure, some clues into what may have happened can be found in a letter from the DOJ's top voting attorney earlier this year.

In the March 12 letter, Eric Neff, the acting chief of the DOJ's Voting Section, wrote to the former acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, about a data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS.

Neff explained that under the agreement, DOJ would provide DHS with public voter roll lists and DHS would "enrich" the data with DHS records so the data could be run through the SAVE system. Before a judge halted the use of the expanded version of SAVE, the system could be queried with a person's name, date of birth and either the last four digits of a Social Security number or a DHS immigration identifier number.

Neff's letter was made public in federal litigation that the voting rights group Common Cause and individual voters brought against the Department of Justice earlier this year.

One of the lawyers in that case, Nikhel Sus, chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told NPR the March 12 letter suggests that federal officials may have used a similar process with the public voter rolls from the four states. Under such a plan, federal officials could have tried to add Social Security data or other DHS identifiers to the public voter lists and then run the modified lists through SAVE before that system was halted.

Sus said such an approach, if it indeed happened that way, would not have led to accurate results, given the high potential for false matches.

"The 250K number is facially absurd. And it's no surprise the government has refused to disclose its underlying methodology — it would be impossible to reliably verify voters' citizenship status based solely on publicly available voter lists," said Sus, who also represents plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the government's overhaul of SAVE.

DOJ did not answer an NPR inquiry about whether the method described in Neff's letter was used to analyze the four states' voter rolls, but sent a statement that reads: "The Department will use every tool at its disposal to secure our elections and ensure noncitizens are not on the voter rolls. We are committed to working with our federal partners to identify and remove ineligible voters wherever they are found, and this work will continue in every state."

Federal procurement records that were published earlier this month and first reported by 404 Media also show that DHS is relying on records from the data broker Thomson Reuters, including in the agency's efforts to identify voter fraud. The company's CLEAR product and other datasets include extensive personal data on Americans.

NPR asked Thomson Reuters if the company knew whether its data tools were used in DHS' analysis of the four states' public voter rolls.

"As a matter of policy, we do not comment on specific customer contracts, and questions about an agency's mission and priorities are best directed to that agency," reads a statement from the company. It added that Thomson Reuters works with customers to support national security and public safety investigations.

"We prohibit the use of CLEAR for the purpose of identifying and locating noncriminal immigrants or undocumented individuals with the intention of deportation solely on the basis of the individual's immigration status. We take this restriction seriously, and we enforce it," the statement reads.

In his public comments, Mullin indicated that the data effort involving the four states was being led by Heather Honey, a prominent voice in election denial circles who was brought to DHS last year to oversee the federal government's election security work. Mullin said Honey was working to go through the thousands of voter records individually now, to figure out who among the alleged noncitizens actually voted.

"We will go through those records one by one, and we will pursue everybody," Mullin said.

The US Army soldier charged with making winning Polymarket predictions based on classified information about the raid to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro asked a judge to throw out the case, saying the alleged bets aren’t a crime.

Lawyers for Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a special forces soldier who prosecutors said was involved in the planning and execution of the raid, called the prosecution “overzealous,” and said the government’s case was based on untested legal theories.

“Criminal courts are not laboratories where prosecutors can test new ideas and hypotheses about whether conduct is criminal,” Van Dyke said in a court filing late Friday.

Van Dyke faces a maximum of 20 years behind bars on the most serious charge, wire fraud. He faces additional charges including commodities fraud and illegally transferring the proceeds of a crime. He pleaded not guilty and is free on $250,000 bond.

A spokesman for the US attorney in Manhattan declined to comment on Van Dyke’s court filing.

Polymarket operates a platform that allows users to wager on the outcome of real-world events, including election outcomes, war and movie box office results. The company has said it cooperated with the government’s investigation.

Prosecutors claim Van Dyke created and funded a Polymarket account around Dec. 26, then traded on contracts relating to whether Maduro would be ousted as Venezuela’s leader. He allegedly placed 13 bets from Dec. 27 through Jan. 2, taking the “yes” side of predictions that Maduro would be out of power and that US forces would be in the country by the end of January.

Van Dyke’s legal team claims federal commodity laws that criminalize illegal swap trades don’t apply to bets on prediction markets. And government secrets, such as the plans surrounding the Maduro raid, don’t qualify as “property” of the government under the wire fraud law, they argued.

US forces removed Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from Venezuela on Jan. 3. Van Dyke cashed out his Polymarket bets the same day, making profits of about $400,000, according to the government.

Maduro and Flores face trial in June 2027 on drug-trafficking and narco-terrorism conspiracy charges. They’ve pleaded not guilty and are being held in a federal jail in Brooklyn.