POLITICS

MINNEAPOLIS — U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi on Monday announced two more arrests following a protest at a Minnesota church against the immigration crackdown, bringing the number of people arrested to nine.

The nine were named in a grand jury indictment unsealed Friday. Independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were among four people arrested Friday. Three others were arrested earlier in the week, including prominent local activist Nekima Levy Armstrong.

A grand jury in Minnesota indicted all nine on federal civil rights charges of conspiracy and interfering with the 1st Amendment rights of worshippers during the Jan. 18 protest at the Cities Church in St. Paul. A pastor at the church is also a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official. The protest generated strong objections from the Trump administration.

In a social media post Monday, Bondi named the latest two arrestees as Ian Davis Austin and Jerome Deangelo Richardson. She gave no details of their arrests.

Lemon, who was fired from CNN in 2023 following a bumpy run as a morning host, has said he had no affiliation to the group that disrupted Sunday service by entering the church. He has described himself as an independent journalist chronicling protesters.

The indictment alleges that Richardson traveled to the church with Lemon while he was streaming and that Richardson told Lemon they needed to catch up to the others. It also alleges that Austin stood in the aisles of the church and loudly berated a pastor with questions about Christian nationalism.

Online jail records show Austin was arrested Friday. It wasn’t immediately clear when Richardson was taken into custody.

Austin’s attorney, Sarah Gad, did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Court records don’t list an attorney for Richardson who could comment on his behalf.

The Justice Department began its investigation after the group interrupted services by chanting, “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” referring to the 37-year-old mother of three who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis.

Cities Church belongs to the Southern Baptist Convention and lists one of its pastors as David Easterwood, who leads ICE’s St. Paul field office.

Karnowski writes for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — The year opened with President Trump declaring that “the fraud investigation of California has begun,” a move that quickly set off a barrage of allegations from his administration and Republican allies questioning the integrity of state programs and the leadership of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The accusations, amplified across social media and conservative outlets, have pushed California and its Democratic leadership to the center of a broader national political fight over waste, fraud and abuse.

Newsom has dismissed the claims as politically driven, arguing that the administration is singling out Democratic-led states while ignoring similar problems elsewhere. The governor also responded by highlighting fraud cases in Republican-led states and by criticizing Trump’s own record and business dealings.

Against that backdrop, it has become increasingly difficult to separate substantiated fraud from fabricated or recycled claims, to distinguish old findings from newly raised allegations and to determine who can credibly claim credit for uncovering wrongdoing — all amid a toxic and deeply polarized political climate.

Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at USC and UC Berkeley, said allegations of malfeasance in California is a particularly ripe target for Republicans because Democrats have controlled the state Legislature and governor’s office for years.

Democrats hold a supermajority in both the Assembly and the Senate, meaning they hold at least two-thirds of seats in both houses, and not a single Republican has been elected to statewide office in California since 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner were reelected.

“There is no shared responsibility here for Republicans,” Schnur said. “If you had a state in which Republicans were actually competitive, they would bear some responsibility for these problems.”

Audits and prosecutions show that California has experienced its share of fraud, particularly in complex programs involving emergency aid, healthcare and unemployment insurance. The state paid out billions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the California State Auditor has issued repeated warnings about state agencies that are “at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement.”

Along with recycling a barrage of years-old allegations of financial malfeasance in California and other Democratic states, the Trump administration elevated claims of child-care fraud in Minnesota last month, prompting Gov. Tim Walz to drop his reelection plans to focus on the growing political crisis in his state.

Fraud allegations are increasingly being deployed as a political weapon against Newsom, a leading Trump critic and a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender. Politicians have always railed against government waste, fraud and abuse, but now those issues are being “weaponized into a partisan issue,” Schnur said.

For the public, it can be hard to discern the truth. Here is a look at three of the central fraud allegations — and what the evidence shows.

Child-care funding

President Trump used his social media platform, Truth Social, to accuse California of widespread fraud last month, drawing a link between his administration’s investigation into child-care spending in Minnesota and programs in the Golden State, and announcing a major federal “fraud investigation” into the state’s actions.

“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible???” wrote Trump, using a disparaging nickname for the governor.

The Trump administration then moved to freeze $10 billion in federal funding for child care in five Democrat-led states — California, New York, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota — over “serious concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars.”

In a trio of Jan. 6 letters addressed to Newsom, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it was concerned there had been “potential for extensive and systemic fraud” in child care and other social services programs that rely on federal funding, and had “reason to believe” that the state was “illicitly providing illegal aliens” with benefits.

The letters did not detail evidence to support the claims. The governor’s office dismissed the accusation as “deranged.”

A federal judge subsequently blocked the Trump administration temporarily from freezing those funds. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick said he didn’t understand why the government was making it harder for states to access child-care money before any wrongdoing had been discovered.

“It just seems like the cart before the horse,” he said.

Hospice funding

Days after Trump’s social media post about alleged corruption under Newsom’s watch, Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, held a joint news conference on public benefits fraud, but offered few details about the scope of their investigation.

The officials accused “foreign actors” of draining billions from public healthcare programs in California, referencing bogus hospice providers first exposed by The Times in 2020 and later investigated by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.

Essayli placed the blame for bad actors squarely on Newsom, calling him “the fraud king.”

Weeks later, Oz released a video of himself walking in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Van Nuys as he questioned why dozens of alleged hospices were operating along four blocks. He blamed the “Russian Armenian Mafia” and made his remarks while pointing to an Armenian bakery, prompting accusations of racism from the Armenian community.

Newsom’s office last week hit back by highlighting state efforts to fight fraud, while pointing to a 2025 Axios story on the Trump administration’s decision to pause a federal program to crack down on bad hospice operators.

Bonta’s office said it has filed criminal charges against 109 individuals over hospice fraud-related offenses and launched dozens of civil investigations.

Newsom, speaking at a Bloomberg event Thursday in San Francisco, said the allegations have been recycled and misrepresented. Later that day, he filed a civil rights complaint against “baseless and racist allegations against Armenian Americans in California” made by Oz.

“Hospice, we’ve been after that for years and years before Oz was even on the scene,” Newsom said. “In 2021, we did a moratorium on new hospice programs, 280 we shuttered.”

The Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services said earlier this year that — in addition to California — Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Ohio and Georgia are being monitored following allegations of fraud and waste.

EDD fraud

The state’s Employment Development Department, known as EDD, reported in 2021 that approximately $20 billion was lost due to fraud, largely in the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program.

While unemployment fraud was rampant across country during the pandemic as governments rushed to provide support, California’s problems stood out.

The state itself admitted in 2021 that it failed to take precautions that had been implemented in other states, including using software to identify suspicious applications and cross-checking benefit claims against personal data on state prison inmates.

Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin) said department mismanagement and fraud often overlap and cited EDD as a prime example.

“When there is a lack of internal controls, a lack of diligence of how funds are used, that makes it easier for those who want to take advantage of the system to profit,” Kiley said.

EDD’s own tracker said the state has recovered more than $6 billion in stolen funds and opened more than 2,300 unemployment fraud investigations since the pandemic began, leading to nearly 1,000 arrests and more than 670 convictions.

The department said it has expanded fraud enforcement through partnerships with law enforcement, new identity-verification technology and a dedicated fraud task force.

But, reports of mismanagement at EDD have continued. A recent audit also found EDD wasted $4.6 million by paying monthly service fees for more than 6,200 cellphones that went unused for at least four consecutive months between November 2020 and April 2025 — including some devices that were inactive for more than four years.

At the same time, “EDD continues to have high rates of improper [unemployed insured] payments, including fraudulent payments, and it needs to improve the customer service it provides to UI claimants,” another report found.

What’s next?

Newsom said there is a reason the Trump administration is not pointing to fraud in Republican-led states.

“This is about polarization, politicalization, weaponization,” Newsom said Thursday.

Asked what the Trump administration will discover in probing California for fraud, Newsom said investigators will find a state “taking that issue very, very seriously.”

“We absolutely are here to be a partner, to go after waste, fraud and abuse,” Newsom said.

State audits show vulnerabilities persist. The California State Auditor has repeatedly flagged Medi-Cal eligibility discrepancies that have exposed the state to billions of dollars in questionable payments, while also warning that weaknesses in information security across state agencies remain a high-risk issue.

Curtailing waste could be particularly important during the upcoming year as California and its state-funded programs head into a period of volatile fiscal uncertainty, driven largely by events in Washington and on Wall Street. Newsom’s own optimistic budget proposal projects a $3-billion state deficit for the next fiscal year despite no major new spending initiatives.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office warned in November that California faces a nearly $18-billion budget shortfall.

It will also be a key issue in upcoming elections. A group of Republicans running for statewide offices, including California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, pegged that the state’s annual estimate of fraud, waste and abuse across state programs at $250 billion, an estimate that includes unverified public tips submitted to a campaign-run website.

The group cited the estimate as justification for creating their own “California Department of Government Efficiency,” or CAL DOGE, a nod to a similarly named federal initiative promoted by Elon Musk that generated headlines but has not produced documented savings or formal audit findings. CAL DOGE is not currently a state department, despite its name.

Who deserves credit when fraud is prosecuted has also become a point of contention. After a man was arrested last month for fleecing L.A.’s homeless services program for $23 million, critics of Newsom were quick to blame the governor. Newsom responded by saying the case was uncovered by local investigators working with law enforcement, which he added is “exactly the kind of accountability and oversight the state has pushed for.” (The Los Angeles district attorney’s office ran a parallel, independent investigation.)

Essayli responded on social media by saying no one made an arrest until Trump and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi “appointed me to investigate and charge fraud offenses in California.”

Kiley, the California Republican congressman, said despite the partisan fighting over fraud, the issue should rally both parties.

The “easiest” way to solve the state’s budget problems and improve government services for taxpayers is to “minimize and eventually eliminate fraud,” said Kiley.

SACRAMENTO — We relearned something from the killings of two law-abiding citizens by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis: There’s a limit to how many government lies the public will tolerate.

When government officials arrogantly persist in blatantly lying, the public just might turn angrily against the prevaricators.

Or maybe they’re not lying technically. They simply might not care whether they’re telling the truth, or what it is. Their only intent is to spew a tale that fits a political agenda. Regardless, the citizenry can stomach only so much.

Another thing we relearned is that when a government keeps acting against the public’s wishes, the public tends to rise up and smack its leader, altering the leader’s direction.

That’s the sign of a functional democracy when enough people get riled up and elbow their way into leading the government themselves.

In the process, they’re very likely to prod various other governments — state and local — into acting on their behalf.

We’ve been seeing this play out in the aftermath of the Minneapolis killings.

But, in fact, the public rebellion has been building during a yearlong nightmare of unjustified, inhumane, un-American violence by federal immigration agents. Their targets have been people with brown skin suspected of living in the country illegally. Never mind that many not only are documented, they’re U.S. citizens.

Such has been the slipshod and authoritarian way President Trump’s promised mass deportation program has been carried out.

Polls have consistently shown that voters strongly support the president’s goals of protecting the border and also deporting the “worst of the worst” undocumented criminals. But people have increasingly objected to his roughhouse methods, including masked federal agents slapping around and pepper-spraying legal protesters.

It’s not clear whether the two Minnesota citizens victimized by quick-draw federal agents were protesting. You can’t believe the Trump administration.

And that’s the danger in habitually lying: People can become so cynical that most disregard whatever they’re told by their so-called leaders. And that cripples what’s necessary for an ongoing healthy democracy: a cooperative relationship based on trust between citizens and those they’ve chosen to govern.

Some things we do know about the slain Minnesota citizens.

Alex Pretti, 37, was an intensive care nurse in a VA hospital. He was shooting video with his cellphone of agents and protesters when he was pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground by several agents as his legally carried handgun was removed. Then he was shot in the back several times.

He was not a “domestic terrorist” and “assassin” who wanted to “massacre law enforcement,” as Trump sycophants immediately lied on TV before backing off, after most of America saw videos of the killing and the president got nervous.

Renee Good, 37, was a mother and poet who appeared merely to be trying to drive through protest chaos when an agent shot her three times through the windshield. She did not try to run down the agent, as the administration claimed.

Good was not “obviously a professional agitator” who “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer,” as Trump wrote on social media.

Public outrage at the lying and the brutish immigration enforcement has pressured elected officials into action all around the country.

Sure, you can call it political grandstanding and, of course, much of it is. But good politics and sound democracy involve listening to the public and acting on its desires.

In Sacramento, the state Senate held an emotional two-hour debate over a bill aimed at permitting people to sue federal law enforcement when their constitutional rights are violated. Rights such as the ability to peacefully protest and to be protected against excessive force. Lawsuits already are allowed against state and local officers. But federal agents are practically untouchable.

Senate Bill 747 by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) passed on a 30-10 party-line vote — Democrats for and Republicans against. The measure moved to the Assembly.

The vote was yet another sorry sign of today’s unhealthy political polarization. Not one Republican could break out of the Trump web and vote to hold illegally operating federal agents accountable in civil courts. But neither could one Democrat detect enough fault in the bill to vote against it.

Some law enforcement groups oppose the legislation because they fear it would spur additional suing against local cops. Look for an amendment in the Assembly.

The heated Senate debate reflected Democratic lawmakers’ frustration with Trump — and many of their constituents’ fears.

“The level of anxiety and anger is higher than I’ve ever seen in my 13 years in the Legislature,” Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) told me.

“People are coming into our offices fearful for relatives or friends who are hiding out, afraid to go to doctors’ appointments and their kids are staying away from schools.”

During the debate, several senators mentioned two young protesters who were each permanently blinded in one eye by rubber bullets shot by Homeland Security officers in Santa Ana. Lawmakers also railed against “kidnappings” off the street of people simply because of their skin colors, accents and dress.

“California is not going to let these thugs get away with it,” Wiener vowed.

“There’s a lot of hyperbole on this floor,” Sen. Tony Strickland (R-Huntington Beach) asserted. He called for repeal of California’s “sanctuary” laws that greatly restrict cooperation by state and local officers with federal immigration agents.

Easing those laws is probably a good idea. But more important, we’ve got to restrain undisciplined federal agents from shooting unarmed people in the back.

Sen. Shannon Grove (R-Bakersfield), who revealed that she has been packing a firearm for 30 years, said that Pretti should never have brought his gun to a protest even if it was legal — which it isn’t in California.

And she’s right. But he never brandished the weapon and shouldn’t have paid with his life.

Neither should Pretti have been immediately attacked as a bad guy by lying federal officials. They’re now paying a political price.

What else you should be reading

The must-read: Planned Parenthood, reproductive healthcare could receive $90 million in new state funding
The TK: Healthcare experts warn “people will die” unless state steps up amid federal cuts
The L.A. Times Special: Meet the un-Gavin. Kentucky’s governor sees a different way to the White House

Until next week,
George Skelton

—
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MINNEAPOLIS — For weeks, administrators at this charter high school have arrived an hour before class, grabbed neon vests and walkie-talkies, and headed out into the cold to watch for ICE agents and escort students in.

Lately, fewer than half of the 800 sudents show up.

“Operation Metro Surge,” the immigration crackdown in Minnesota that led to nationwide protests after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens, has had students, parents and teachers on edge regardless of their immigration status.

Signs of a fearful new normal are all over the school. Green craft paper covers the bottom of many first-floor windows so outsiders can’t peer in. A notice taped outside one door says unauthorized entry is prohibited: “This includes all federal law enforcement personnel and activities unless authorized by lawful written direction from appropriate school officials or a valid court order.”

Students at a Minneapolis high school classroom with many empty seats on Jan. 29, 2026.

Staff coordinate throughout the day with a neighborhood watch group to determine whether ICE agents are nearby. When they are, classroom doors are locked and hallways emptied until staff announce “all clear.”

Similar tactics have been utilized by schools in other cities hit by immigration raids across the country. The Los Angeles Unified School District established a donation fund for affected families and created security perimeters around schools last summer.

But it appears nowhere have students felt the repercussions of local raids more than in Minneapolis.

Many schools have seen attendance plummet by double-digit percentages. At least three other, smaller charter schools in Minneapolis have completely shut down in-person learning.

At this high school, which administrators asked The Times not to identify for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, 84% of students are Latino and 12% are Black. Staff and students are being identified by first or middle names.

A balloon sits in a hallway at the high school.

Doors and windows are covered at the school so outsiders can’t see in.

Three students have been detained — and later released — in recent weeks. Two others were followed into the school parking lot and questioned about their immigration status. Several have parents who were deported or who self-deported. Latino staff said they have also been stopped and questioned about their legal status.

“Our families feel hunted,” said Noelle, the school district’s executive director.

Students returned from winter break on Jan. 6, the same day 2,000 additional immigration agents were dispatched to Minneapolis to carry out what Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons called the agency’s “largest immigration operation ever.” The next day, an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three.

“I describe that day as if you’re on an airplane and it’s really bad turbulence, and you have to keep your cool because, if you don’t, you lose the entire building,” said Emmanuel, an assistant principal. “It felt like we went through war.”

Attendance dropped by the hundreds as parents grew too afraid to let their children leave home. School leaders decided to offer online learning and scrambled to find enough laptops and mobile hotspots for the many students who didn’t have devices or internet. Some teachers sent packets of schoolwork to students by mail.

A teacher at the Minneapolis high school that administrators asked The Times not to identify for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. Teachers and students there also asked not to be identified.

Noelle said in-person attendance, which had dropped below 400 students, increased by around 100 in the third week of January. Then federal agents shot and killed 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti, and attendance plummeted again.

Rochelle Van Dijk, vice president of Great MN Schools, a nonprofit supporting schools that serve a majority of students of color, said many schools have redirected tens of thousands of dollars away from other critical needs toward online learning, food distribution and safety planning. For students still attending in person, recess has frequently been canceled, and field trips and after-school activities paused.

Even if students return to school by mid-February, Van Dijk said, they will have missed 20% of their instructional days for the year.

“A senior who can’t meet with their college counselor right now just missed support needed for major January college application deadlines. Or a second-grader with a speech delay who is supposed to be in an active in-person intervention may lose a critical window of brain plasticity,” she said. “It is not dissimilar to what our nation’s children faced during COVID, but entirely avoidable.”

At the high school, administrators said they tried to create “a security bubble,” operating under protocols more typical of active shooter emergencies.

Gym class at the Minneapolis school, where many students are so afraid of ICE that they won’t go to the campus.

If agents were to enter the building without a judicial warrant, the school would go into a full lockdown, turning off lights, staying silent and moving out of sight. That hasn’t happened, though ICE last year rescinded a policy that had barred arrests at so-called sensitive locations, including schools.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said that blaming ICE for low school attendance is “creating a climate of fear and smearing law enforcement.”

“ICE does not target schools,” McLaughlin said. “If a dangerous or violent illegal criminal alien felon were to flee into a school, or a child sex offender is working as an employee, there may be a situation where an arrest is made to protect the safety of the student. But this has not happened.”

Alondra, a 16-year-old junior who was born in the U.S., was arrested after school Jan. 21 near a clinic where she had gone with a friend, also 16, to pick up medication for her grandmother.

She said that as she was about to turn into the parking lot, another car sped in front of her, forcing her to stop. Alondra saw four men in ski masks with guns get out. Scared, she put her car in reverse. Before she could move, she said, another vehicle pulled up and struck her car from behind.

Alondra shared videos with The Times that she recorded from the scene. She said agents cracked her passenger window in an attempt to get in.

“We’re with you!” a bystander can be heard telling her in the video as others blow emergency whistles.

She said she rolled her window down and an agent asked to see her ID. She gave him her license and U.S. passport.

“Is it necessary to have to talk to you or can I talk to an actual cop?” she asks in the video. “Can I talk to an actual cop from here?”

“We are law enforcement,” the agent replies. “What are they gonna do?”

In another video, an agent questions Alondra’s friend about the whereabouts of his parents. Another agent is heard saying Alondra had put her car in reverse.

“We’re underage,” she tells him. “We’re scared.”

A sign directs students to line up for their school bus route. Bus pickups are staggered, with one group of students escorted outside at a time. This way, the children can be taken back inside the school or onto the bus more easily if ICE arrives.

A Minneapolis Public Radio reporter at the scene said agents appeared to have rear-ended Alondra’s car. But Alondra said an agent claimed she had caused the accident.

“It’s just a simple accident, you know what I mean?” he says in the video. “We’re not gonna get on you for trying to hit us or something.”

“Can you let us go, please?” her friend, visibly shaken, asks the agent at his window.

Alondra and her friend were handcuffed and placed in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicle as observers filmed the incident. At least two observers were arrested as agents deployed tear gas and pepper spray, according to an MPR report.

The agents took the students to the federal Whipple Building. Alondra said the agents separated the friends, looked through and photographed her belongings and had her change into blue canvas shoes before chaining her feet together and placing her in a holding cell alone.

“I asked at least five times if I could let my guardian know what was happening, because I was underage, but they never let me,” she said.

Finally, around 7 p.m., agents released Alondra — with no paperwork about the incident — and she called her aunt to pick her up. Her friend was released later.

Meanwhile, school administrators who saw the MPR video called Alondra’s family and her friend’s.

Alondra said officers didn’t know what had happened to her car and told her they would call her when she could pick it up. But no one has called, and school administrators who helped her make calls to Minneapolis impound lots haven’t been able to locate it either.

Though Alondra could attend classes online, she felt she had to return to campus.

“I feel like if I would have stayed home, it would have gone worse for me,” she said, her lip quivering. “I use school as a distraction.”

The backstage of the auditorium, dubbed the bodega, has been turned into a well-stocked pantry for families who are too afraid to leave their homes.

A volunteer organizes donated items for distribution to families at the Minneapolis high school.

A teacher makes a delivery to a family in Minneapolis.

Teachers and volunteers sort donations by category, including hygiene goods, breakfast cereals, bread and tortillas, fruit and vegetables, diapers and other baby items. Bags are labeled with each student’s name and address and filled with the items their family has requested. After school, teachers deliver the items to the students’ homes.

Noelle said some students, particularly those who are homeless, are now at risk of failing because they’re in “survival mode.” Their learning is stagnating, she said.

“A lot of these kids are — I mean, they want to be — college-bound,” Noelle said. “How do you compete [for admission] with the best applicants if you’re online right now and doing one touch-point a day with one teacher because that’s all the technology that you have?”

On Thursday afternoon, 20 of 44 students had shown up for an AP world history class where the whiteboard prompt asked, “Why might some people resort to violent resistance rather than peaceful protest?”

Upstairs, in an 11th-grade U.S. history class, attendance was even worse — four students, with 17 others following online. The topic was what the teacher called the nation’s “first immigration ban,” the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Students head to their bus at the high school.

Morgan, the teacher, asked the students to name a similarity between the Chinese exclusion era and current day.

“Immigrants getting thrown out,” one student offered.

“Once they leave, they can’t come back,” said another.

“The fact that this is our first ban on immigration also sets a precedent that this stuff can happen over and over and over again,” Morgan said.

Sophie, who teachers English language learners, led the effort to organize the online school option. She is from Chile and says she has struggled to put her own fear aside to be present for the students who rely on her. Driving to school scares her, too.

“It’s lawless,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that I have my passport in my purse. The minute I open my mouth, they’re going to know that I’m not from here.”

Sophie said she once had to call a student’s mother to say her husband had been taken by immigration agents after another school staffer found his car abandoned on a nearby street.

“Having to have that conversation wasn’t on my bingo card for that day, or any day,” she said. “Having to say that we have proof that your husband was taken and hearing that woman crying and couldn’t talk, and I’m like, what do I say now?”

Close to the 4:15 p.m. dismissal, administrators again donned their neon vests and logged on to the neighborhood Signal call for possible immigration activity.

Students walk to a bus Thursday. Dismissal used to be a free-for-all, with large numbers of students rushing outside as soon as the bell rang.

Dismissal used to be a free-for-all — once the final bell rang, students would rush outside to find their bus or ride or to begin the walk home.

Now pickups are staggered, with students escorted outside one bus at a time. Teachers grab numbered signs and tell students to line up according to their route. If ICE agents pull up, administrators said, they could rush a smaller group of students onto the bus or back inside.

In yet another example of how the immigration raids had crippled attendance, some buses were nearly empty. On one bus, just two students hopped on.

It all began after a viral video alleging fraud in Somali-run child-care centers in Minneapolis: strangers peering through windows, right-wing journalists showing up outside homes, influencers hurling false accusations.

In San Diego, child-care provider Samsam Khalif was shuttling kids to her home-based center when she was spooked by two men with a camera waiting in a car parked outside, prompting her to circle the block several times before unloading the children.

“I’m scared. I don’t know what their intention is,” said Khalif, who decided to install additional security cameras outside her home.

Somali-run child-care centers across the United States have become targets since the video caught the attention of the White House amid the administration’s immigration crackdown. Child-care providers worry about how they can maintain the safe learning environments they have worked to create for young children who may be spending their first days away from their parents.

In the Minneapolis area, child-care providers, many of them immigrants, say they’re being antagonized, exacerbating the stress they face from immigration enforcement activity that has engulfed the city.

One child-care provider said she watched someone emerge from a car that had been circling the building and defecate near the center’s entrance. The same day, a motorist driving by yelled that the center was a “fake day care.” She’s had to create new lockdown procedures, is budgeting for security and now keeps the blinds closed to shield children from unwanted visitors and from witnessing immigration enforcement actions.

“I can’t have peace of mind about whether the center will be safe today,” said the provider, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being targeted. “That’s a hard pill to swallow.”

Video’s claims disproved

The day after Christmas, right-wing influencer Nick Shirley posted a lengthy video with allegations that members of Minneapolis’ large Somali community were running fake child-care centers so they could collect federal child-care subsidies.

The U.S. occasionally has seen fraud cases related to child-care subsidies. But the Minneapolis video’s central claims — that business owners were billing the government for children they were not caring for — were disproved by inspectors. Nonetheless, the Trump administration attempted to freeze child-care funding for Minnesota and five other Democratic-led states until a court ordered the funding to be released.

President Trump has repeatedly targeted Somali immigrants with dehumanizing rhetoric, calling them “garbage” and “low IQ” and suggesting that Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who was born in Somalia, should be deported: “Throw her the hell out!” In Minnesota, 87% of foreign-born Somalis are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Trump has zeroed in on a years-old case in which a sprawling network of fraudsters — many of them Somali Americans — bilked Minnesota of an estimated $300 million that was supposed to help feed children and families. His rhetoric intensified after Shirley’s video was posted.

Activists take it upon themselves to investigate

In Federal Way, Wash., and Columbus, Ohio, both home to large Somali communities, right-wing journalists and influencers began showing up unannounced at addresses for child-care operations they pulled from state websites.

In one video, a man arrives at a bungalow-style building in Columbus. He films through the glass front door, showing a foyer with cheerful posters that read “When we learn, we grow” and “Make today happy.”

“It does not look like a child-care center at all,” the man says.

Ohio dispatched an inspector to the address and found that it was, in fact, a legitimate child-care center. The center’s voicemail was hacked, so parents calling heard a slur-laden message calling Somalis “sand rats” and saying they “worship a false religion of baby-raping terrorists,” according to WOSU-FM.

In Washington state, child-care workers called police on the right-wing journalists who kept appearing outside their homes.

Journalists with the right-leaning Washington outlet Center Square filmed themselves pressing a woman for proof that she ran a child-care center for which she was collecting federal subsidies. She refused to answer questions.

“Are you aware of the Somali day-care fraud? We’re just trying to check out if this is a real day care,” one of the journalists said. “Where are the children?”

Local officials speak out

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson posted a statement on X saying she would not tolerate anyone trying to “intimidate, harass or film Somali child care providers.” Then, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, issued her own warning: “Asking questions/citizen journalism are NOT HATE CRIMES in America — they are protected speech, and if Seattle tries to chill that speech, @CivilRights will step in to protect it and set them straight!”

In Ohio, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine held a news conference to debunk a right-wing influencer’s fraud claims about a Columbus child-care center and assured people the state diligently monitored centers that receive public money. He said a child-care provider refusing to let in a stranger should not be read as a sign of fraud.

“It shouldn’t be a shock when someone sees something on social media, and someone is going, ‘I can’t get into this place, no one will let me in,’” DeWine said in a news conference in January. “Well, hell, no! No one should let them in.”

Even after DeWine refuted the claims, Republicans in the Statehouse introduced legislation to more closely monitor child-care centers, including one measure that would require those that take public money to provide live video feeds of their classrooms to state officials.

Advocates say fraud claims are a distraction

Child-care advocates say the fraud allegations are detracting from more pressing crises.

Child-care subsidy programs in many states have lengthy waiting lists, making it difficult for parents to return to work. The programs that subsidize child care for families that struggle to afford it are also facing funding threats, including from the Trump administration.

Ruth Friedman, who headed the Office of Child Care under President Biden, accused Trump and Republicans of manufacturing a crisis for political gain.

“They are using it to try to discredit the movement toward investing in child care,” said Friedman, who is now a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Century Foundation.

Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement that the department “rejects the claim that concerns about child care program integrity are manufactured.” He urged people to report suspected fraud to the government.

Balingit and Kramon write for the Associated Press.

SACRAMENTO — Matt Mahan, the mayor of San José and latest entrant into the jam-packed race for California governor, has in recent years raised his profile outside his Silicon Valley-area city by doing something most other elected Democrats would never: publicly criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom.

With the primary election almost four months away, candidates have already been busy trying to convince Californians that they can lead the state through its biggest challenges, including what they might do differently than Newsom on homelessness, crime and the high cost of living.

Democratic hopefuls have so far done so subtly, without taking direct shots at Newsom.

Until Mahan entered the race.

The 43-year-old-mayor began carving a moderate path in 2024, when he broke with Newsom and other Democrats to back Proposition 36, which increased penalties for theft and crimes involving fentanyl. Despite opposition from Newsom and legislative leaders, voters overwhelmingly approved it.

Mahan has also given mixed reviews to the Newsom administration’s approach to homelessness; he has praised efforts to make it easier for cities to clear homeless encampments but criticized inconsistent funding from the state to help local governments build interim housing.

Although most Democrats running to replace Newsom have praised his fiery opposition to President Trump and the Republican-led Congress, including the governor’s outlandish online trolling of Trump and his allies, Mahan was not impressed.

“Instead of spending so much energy attacking his opponents, the governor and his team should be addressing the high cost of energy, helping hard-pressed families make ends meet and keeping them and their employers from fleeing our state,” Mahan wrote last summer in a piece for the San Francisco Standard.

Mahan told reporters last week that his disagreements with Newsom are “rooted in substance” and praised the governor for muscling through major reforms to the California Environmental Quality Act and behavioral health treatment.

“I see the job of the next governor” as “building on many of the initiatives [Newsom] has championed,” he said, adding he would use those new reforms to build more housing and treatment facilities for people struggling with addiction and mental illness.

Newsom has routinely won approval from the state’s Democratic base, as well as respect and deference from its elected leaders, and his notoriety as a top foe of Trump continues to rise. Because the perch of California governor provides Democrats with an effective cudgel against the Republican administration, attacking Newsom could easily backfire in this left-leaning state.

“It’s a very delicate balancing act” to campaign to replace a leader of one’s own party, said Democratic strategist Garry South, who has worked on four California gubernatorial campaigns.

“The traditional way to do it is to try to project that you will build on things that the incumbent has done: programs they started, successes they’ve had,” he said.

South, who ran Newsom’s first, short-lived, campaign for governor in 2009, took issue with Mahan’s criticisms of the governor.

“To stick it to the incumbent of your own party might be OK if that person is viewed as a failure. … The fact is, Newsom is not unpopular. This guy’s had four massive victories in California,” he said, listing Newsom’s two elections in 2018 and 2022, defeating a recall in 2021 and overwhelmingly passing Proposition 50 last year.

Like Mahan, billionaire venture-capitalist-turned-environmentalist Tom Steyer has cast himself as an outsider of California’s Democratic establishment. Though he has so far avoided disparaging anyone directly, Steyer dinged “Sacramento politicians [who] are afraid to change this system” when he launched his campaign in November.

Early on in his campaign, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa indicated he would backtrack on Newsom’s strict oil drilling limits and what he calls heavy-handed regulations, which the industry has blamed for the state’s high gas prices.

A Phillips 66 refinery shut down last fall and a Valero refinery in Northern California plans to idle by the end of April, raising concerns that prices in the state’s isolated fuels market could climb even higher.

Villaraigosa previously told The Times he is “not fighting for refineries” but “for the people who pay for gas in this state.”

The former mayor took a more aggressive approach in the California’s governor’s race in 2018, when Villaraigosa accused Newsom of selling “snake oil” with his support for single-payer healthcare in order to win over the nurses union and progressives. Villaraigosa, who ran on a moderate platform, finished in a distant third place in the primary, and Newsom went on to win two terms as governor.

Former Rep. Katie Porter has gone in a more progressive direction on oil. When asked in October to name a policy arena in which she would act differently than Newsom, Porter said she would not have signed recent legislation to allow 2,000 new oil wells in Kern County.

“Drilling new wells is locking us into 100-plus years of energy of the past,” she said. “I absolutely know that we need our refineries to stay open. … But I’m concerned about the environmental consequences, the environmental justice consequences, the shortened lifespan and pollution that we see in some of our fossil fuel-producing places.”

While Newsom and most other candidates for governor have raised concerns about a proposed statewide ballot measure to tax the assets of billionaires, primarily to raise billions of dollars in revenue to blunt the impact of federal healthcare cuts, Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction, has embraced the idea.

Even before the potential ballot measure drove some billionaires into leaving the state, Thurmond said that if elected, he would introduce a tax “solely on megamillionaires and billionaires to hire more teachers, healthcare workers, firefighters, construction workers and social workers,” who would earn “decent middle-class wages” to bolster the state’s economy.

Thurmond has also repeatedly said he would pursue single-payer healthcare in California, a promise Newsom also campaigned on before his first term but did not fully deliver.

Betty Yee, a former state controller and budget director, has pitched herself as the most qualified candidate to fix California’s ongoing budget deficits, and took swipes at accounting tricks Newsom and other governors have used in the past.

Newsom and state lawmakers have faced criticism for using short-term tactics like deferred spending and internal borrowing to fill budget shortfalls while ignoring the larger issue: The state regularly spends more money than it brings in.

“No more gimmicks. We can’t kick the can down the road anymore,” Yee said during a recent interview with KTLA. She said she would implement “spending cuts — not like DOGE” and explore “corporations and upper-income earners” potentially paying more tax revenue.

Newsom, aware that he’s entering lame-duck status, has jokingly called himself “a milk carton with a sell-by date” and admitted “these questions about who’s next and all that are uncomfortable.”

Asked specifically about Mahan’s criticisms, Newsom on Thursday declined to fuel any supposed rivalry with the San José mayor.

“I don’t know enough about him,” the governor said. “I wish him good luck.”

Times staff writer Taryn Luna contributed to this report.

A central question in the congressional investigation of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys is whether Carol C. Lam in San Diego was dismissed, and Debra Wong Yang in Los Angeles eased out, to try to derail corruption probes of prominent California Republicans.

Whatever officials in Washington might have intended, Yang and Lam’s departures had no effect on the investigations, which continue unabated, sources close to the inquiries said this week. And several present and former federal prosecutors said it would be extremely difficult — though not impossible — to quash an investigation for political reasons.

“Most criminal prosecutors are an independent sort with a strong sense of pursuing truth and justice,” said William W. Carter, a Los Angeles federal prosecutor for 14 years before moving to the firm Musick, Peeler & Garrett in November. “They would be repulsed, and rebel, against any political order. There would be an uproar.”

Although the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys are political appointees, their offices are staffed with career prosecutors who are tasked with pursuing justice without regard for any political agenda.

Those prosecutors — assistant U.S. attorneys — often come from top-flight law schools and see the job as a noble calling. Many of them could make much more money in private practice.

Calling a prosecutor off a case — particularly if the motive were transparently political — would cause an uproar, said Loyola Law School professor and former federal prosecutor Laurie L. Levenson. “You’d have to suspend reality to think you could get away with it,” she said.

The U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego is moving forward on the expanding investigation that netted Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Rancho Santa Fe), the sources said. And prosecutors in Los Angeles continue to examine Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-Redlands) over various dealings with lobbyists and contractors during the time he was chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

Neither Lam nor Yang had direct involvement in the corruption investigations, the sources said. According to one source close to the Lewis inquiry, Yang never asked to be briefed by her prosecutors, nor did she give them any input. “It was just nothing … which was good.”

The sources close to the probes requested anonymity because a Justice Department policy bars public comment on ongoing investigations.

Yang emphatically denied that she was pushed out or that she or her successor was asked to stop a politically charged investigation.

“You have so many players involved, it’s ridiculous that you could make an investigation disappear, especially one that is high profile — because those are the ones all the assistants want to work on,” she said.

Levenson said there are subtle ways, however, to let a case “die a slow death.”

Supervisors could assign the prosecutors other matters to work on or divert resources away from the case. They could balk at issuing subpoenas or seeking approvals of various sorts from Washington. And when it comes time to seek an indictment, particularly if the case is not a slam-dunk, the U.S. attorney or even the Justice Department in Washington could waver and tell the prosecutors that they need to do more investigating.

Yet even this scenario is more likely to happen in a John Grisham novel than in real life, Levenson said.

Congressional investigators first focused on the possibility that Lam was fired because of the expanding Cunningham inquiry or the Lewis investigation. Although Lam’s office was not involved in the Lewis probe, those involved in the firings might not have known that because both cases involved the same prominent lobbyist, several prosecutors suggested.

Now some of the focus has shifted to Yang, with testimony indicating that the White House might have been looking to push her out.

In October 2006 — less than two months before the firings — Yang announced her resignation to take a job at the Los Angeles firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which was defending Lewis and has strong Republican ties. Her new salary is reportedly about $1.5 million a year.

Yang said at the time that, as a recently divorced mother of three, she needed to enter the private sector to support her family.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales, in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, was questioned Thursday about Yang’s resignation, but insisted that she left of her own accord.

But in recent testimony to congressional investigators, D. Kyle Sampson, the Justice Department aide who coordinated the firings, said the White House had inquired in September about pushing Yang out to “create a vacancy.”

“I remember [White House Counsel] Harriet Miers asking me about Debra Yang … and what her plans were, whether she might be asked to resign,” Sampson told investigators last month, according to a senior congressional aide.

An opinion piece by a New York Times editorial editor, Adam Cohen, suggested that Gibson Dunn might have lured Yang away with the rich salary offer to get her off the Lewis investigation.

Gibson Dunn lawyers took offense at the suggestion.

“It’s absurd,” said Randy Mastro, co-chairman of the firm’s crisis management group with Yang.

It was well known that Yang was looking for something new, he added, and at least three top firms were actively recruiting her.

As for her being pushed out, he said Yang notified Miers in January 2006 that she planned to leave by the end of summer.

Mastro would not comment specifically on the Lewis investigation.

joe.mozingo@latimes.com

IN RECENT WEEKS, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislators have talked about giving California a well-deserved bigger say in the presidential campaign by moving up the state’s primary. However, if Democrats really want to put the party in the strongest possible position to succeed in presidential elections, let’s completely rethink the current primary system and replace it with a nominating process designed to pick the candidate best able to win.

In 2004, the primary season was frontloaded around a few early, relatively small and not especially diverse states in order to identify as quickly as possible the “most electable” candidate and to conserve money for the general election. Because these were small states that are historically won one voter and one constituency group at a time, candidates were rewarded for their retail campaign skills: one-on-one politics, constituency group building and a good biography. Unfortunately, these skills are about as relevant to a 21st century national presidential campaign as horseback riding is relevant to driving a car.

Modern presidential campaigns are tests of character; they’re a hunt for candidates who have broad appeal (as opposed to a biography attractive to only a limited range of voters). They’re about identifying candidates with the ability to articulate a message that speaks to all Americans, rather than those who rely on the typical 12-point plans constructed for one constituency group or another. Modern presidential races are about the ability to connect with voters over the TV in their living rooms — not about a candidate’s charm when he meets with them in person in their own living rooms. And they’re about the capacity to assemble and run a far-flung organization capable of raising well in excess of $100 million in just a few years.

With three reforms, the Democrats can put in place a nominating system that will produce the strongest and, yes, most electable candidate.

First, the Democratic primary schedule should open with a group of states that, when taken together, represents the mosaic that is America. Along with a Midwestern Iowa and a Northeastern New Hampshire, let’s have a state from the Southwest, South and West all voting on the same day.

A multi-state campaign taking place on one day and involving a diverse set of states will begin the process of identifying the candidate who can put together the winning qualities of a national campaign.

Second, the primary season needs to be spread over a longer time period — not just in theory but in practice as well, so candidates are truly tested. Beginning in early February and going until May, Democrats should schedule a series of 10 primaries, with each involving five geographically diverse states voting every two weeks. The diverse and multi-state nature of the races would make it far more likely that the campaign would be competitive for a longer period. (Under the current system, the 2008 primary could effectively be over after four early states vote in a span of a few weeks, as it was in 2004. The compressed time period and winner-take-all nature of the existing system means that whoever does well in these first states, especially the first two, is in all likelihood the presumptive nominee.)

This sort of diverse process over an extended time period worked in 1992 — the only time in the last 25 years that the Democrats nominated a candidate, Bill Clinton, who went on to be sworn in as president. That year, because Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin was running in the Iowa caucuses and because New Hampshire voters chose former Sen. Paul Tsongas of neighboring Massachusetts, neither Iowa nor New Hampshire played their historically determinative roles. In fact, the 1992 election was the first time in history that a candidate became president who did not win the New Hampshire primary. Instead, Democrats had to compete vigorously over the course of several months in such places as South Dakota, and then in Georgia (where Clinton got his first win), Maryland, Colorado, South Carolina, Arizona, Super Tuesday, and then on to Connecticut, New York and eventually California, where Clinton wrapped up the nomination in early June.

If Democrats had been using the 2004 primary system in 1992, their nominee could well have been Tsongas. The longer, diversified schedule, however, allowed Clinton to prove himself to voters, exposed the candidates’ relative strengths and weaknesses and allowed the Democrats to stay on the offensive and define the terms of the general election. Democrats ended up with a candidate who actually won a number of states in the South and all the states in the upper Midwest — and who had the message, the battle-hardened ability and the proven campaign operation needed to beat the Republicans.

The third reform, in order to encourage more voter participation and loosen the grip of the Washington establishment on the Democratic Party’s nomination process, is a three-part proposal: Eliminate the “super delegate” system. Super delegates are a significant pool of at-large, free-agent delegates representing the Democratic apparatus (including both party and elected officials) in the nominating process. In addition, the party should establish a system that more closely resembles the system that states such as Maine and Nebraska use in the general election, in which they divide nominating delegates by congressional districts, with votes for each district and additional points for whichever candidate wins the majority of the state’s total vote. Finally, as in New Hampshire, independents should be allowed to vote in Democratic primaries.

These changes would force candidates to compete for an ideologically broader range of voters throughout all regions of a state, including in urban, suburban, exurban and rural districts.

Even a cursory glance at a red-and-blue color-coded map that divides the country’s counties up shows that Democrats need to compete in more than just the major cities and coastal regions. Not only will this be of enormous help to producing a candidate who can compete nationally — it will help the party’s candidates lower down on the ballot, where Democrats face challenges in traditional swing communities.

The winning coalition for Democrats will in all likelihood not be the old Democratic coalition of labor, minorities, women and coastal progressives. As the 2006 midterms demonstrated, for the Democratic Party to regain a permanent majority status, our candidates must win by talking to all Americans.

Reporting from Washington — The FBI office that handles employee discipline has recommended firing the bureau’s former deputy director over allegations that he authorized the disclosure of sensitive information to a reporter and misled investigators when asked about it — though Justice Department officials are still reviewing the matter and have not come to a final decision, a person familiar with the case said.

The recommendation from the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility is likely to add fuel to the political fire surrounding former deputy director Andrew McCabe, who abruptly stepped down from his post earlier this year but technically remained an FBI employee.

McCabe was hoping to retire in days, when he becomes eligible for his full benefits. If he is fired, he could lose his retirement benefits. President Trump has long made McCabe a particular target of his ire, and the recommendation to fire the former No. 2 FBI official could give him new ammunition.

Through a representative, McCabe declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman said in a statement: “The Department follows a prescribed process by which an employee may be terminated. That process includes recommendations from career employees, and no termination decision is final until the conclusion of that process. We have no personnel announcements at this time.”

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz has for some time been working on a report that blasts McCabe for allowing two high-ranking bureau officials to sit down with the Wall Street Journal as the news outlet prepared a story in 2016 on an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s family foundation, then misleading the inspector general’s team about his actions. A person familiar with the matter said Horowitz’s findings are what sparked the Office of Professional Responsibility’s recommendation, which was first reported by The New York Times. Horowitz’s report has not yet been released.

McCabe, 49, had long been expected to retire March 18, though he abruptly left his post earlier this year after his boss, FBI Director Christopher Wray, was told of what the inspector general had found.

The situation now seems fraught for all involved. If the Justice Department does not move on the recommendation, conservatives might view officials there as unfairly protecting McCabe. Trump — who already has a strained relationship with Justice Department leaders — might be particularly displeased.

But if the FBI fires McCabe with just days to go before his retirement, it could be viewed as bending to the will of a vindictive president. Trump has previously suggested McCabe was biased in favor of Clinton, pointing out that McCabe’s wife, who ran as a Democrat for a seat in the Virginia Legislature, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the political action committee of Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia and a noted Clinton ally. The president remarked in December that McCabe was “racing the clock to retire with full benefits.”

The inspector general has since last January been investigating the FBI and Justice Department’s handling of the politically charged probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of State, which is separate from the foundation inquiry. McCabe represents but a piece of that work.

Horowitz is also examining broad allegations of misconduct involving former FBI Director James Comey, including the public statement he made recommending that the Clinton email case be closed without charges and his decision 11 days before the election to reveal to Congress that the FBI had resumed its work. McCabe briefly took over as the FBI’s acting director after Trump fired Comey in May.

The story for which McCabe authorized FBI officials to discuss came just as the bureau announced it was resuming its look at Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of State, though it focused more on a different case involving her family’s foundation.

The story presented McCabe as a complicated figure — one who lower-level officials felt was stymieing their work, even though it detailed McCabe pushing back against Justice Department officials so the case could move forward.

The inspector general was interested in McCabe’s role in authorizing officials to talk about the matter, people familiar with the case said, because the story detailed ongoing criminal investigative work, which law enforcement officials are not normally allowed to discuss.

The Wall Street Journal story was written by Devlin Barrett, who is now a reporter at the Washington Post. Recently released text messages show that Barrett had talked with the FBI’s top spokesman, Michael Kortan, and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who worked for McCabe, two days before it was published.

Background briefings with reporters are common in Washington, particularly when reporters have information that officials feel compelled to respond to or add context. In this instance, though, it might have been viewed as inappropriate because the discussion was focused on an ongoing criminal investigation.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Sunday that he will move to close Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for two years starting in July for construction, his latest proposal to upend the storied venue since returning to the White House.

Trump’s announcement on social media follows a wave of cancellations by leading performers, musicians and groups since the president ousted the previous leadership and added his name to the building. Trump made no mention in his post of the recent cancellations.

His proposal, announced days after the premiere of “Melania,” a documentary about the first lady, was shown at the center, is subject to approval by the board of the Kennedy Center, which has been stocked with his handpicked allies. Trump chairs the center’s board of trustees.

“This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially and structurally for many years, and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment,” Trump wrote in his post.

Neither Trump nor Kennedy Center President Ric Grenell, a Trump ally, have provided evidence to back up their claims about the building being in disrepair, and in October, Trump had pledged the center would remain open during renovations. In Sunday’s announcement, he said the center will close July 4, when he said the construction would begin.

“Our goal has always been to not only save and permanently preserve the Center, but to make it the finest Arts Institution in the world,” Grenell said in a post, citing funds Congress approved for repairs.

“This will be a brief closure,” Grenell said. “It desperately needs this renovation and temporarily closing the Center just makes sense — it will enable us to better invest our resources, think bigger and make the historic renovations more comprehensive. It also means we will be finished faster.”

The sudden decision to close and reconstruct the Kennedy Center is certain to spark blowback as Trump revamps the popular venue. The building began as a national cultural center and Congress renamed it as a “living memorial” to President Kennedy — a champion of the arts during his administration — in 1964, in the aftermath of his assassination.

Opened in 1971, it serves as a public showcase year-round for the arts, including the National Symphony Orchestra.

Since Trump returned to the White House, the Kennedy Center is one of many Washington landmarks that he has sought to overhaul in his second term. He demolished the East Wing of the White House and launched a massive $400-million ballroom project, is actively pursuing building a triumphal arch on the other side the Arlington Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial, and has plans for Washington Dulles International Airport.

Leading performing arts groups have pulled out of appearances at the Kennedy Center, most recently composer Philip Glass, who announced his decision to withdraw his Symphony No. 15 “Lincoln” because he said the values of the center today are in “direct conflict” with the message of the piece.

Last month, the Washington National Opera announced that it will move performances away from the Kennedy Center in another high-profile departure after Trump’s takeover of the U.S. capital’s leading performing arts venue.

The head of artistic programming for the center abruptly left his post last week, less than two weeks after being named to the job.

A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center could not immediately be reached and did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Late last year, as Trump announced his plan to rename the building — adding his name to the building’s main front ahead of that of Kennedy — he drew sharp opposition from members of Congress, and some Kennedy family members.

Kerry Kennedy, a niece of John F. Kennedy, said in a social post on X at the time that she will remove Trump’s name herself with a pickax when his term ends.

Another family member, Maria Shriver, said at the time that it is “beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy,” her uncle. “It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not.”

Late Sunday evening, Shriver posted a new comment mimicking Trump’s own voice and style, and suggesting the closure of the venue was meant to deflect from the cancellations.

She said that “entertainers are canceling left and right” and the president has determined that “since the name change no one wants to perform there any longer.”

Trump has decided, she said, it’s best “to close this center down and rebuild a new center” that will bear his name. She asked, “Right?”

One lawmaker, Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and ex-officio trustee of the center’s board, sued in December, arguing that “only Congress has the authority to rename the Kennedy Center.”

Price and Mascaro write for the Associated Press. AP writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

PORTLAND, Ore. — The mayor of Portland, Ore., demanded U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement leave his city after federal agents launched tear gas at a crowd of demonstrators — including young children — outside an ICE facility during a weekend protest that he and others characterized as peaceful.

Witnesses said agents deployed tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets as thousands of marchers arrived at the South Waterfront facility on Saturday. Erin Hoover Barnett, a former OregonLive reporter who joined the protest, said she was about 100 yards from the building when “what looked like two guys with rocket launchers” started dousing the crowd with gas.

“To be among parents frantically trying to tend to little children in strollers, people using motorized carts trying to navigate as the rest of us staggered in retreat, unsure of how to get to safety, was terrifying,” Barnett wrote in an email to OregonLive.

Mayor Keith Wilson said the daytime demonstration was peaceful, “where the vast majority of those present violated no laws, made no threat and posed no danger” to federal agents.

“To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave,” Wilson wrote in a statement Saturday night. “Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame.”

The Portland Fire Bureau sent paramedics to treat people at the scene, police said. Police officers monitored the crowd but made no arrests Saturday.

The Portland protest was one of many demonstrations nationwide against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in cities including Minneapolis, where in recent weeks federal agents killed two residents, Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Federal agents in Eugene, Ore., deployed tear gas on Friday when protesters tried to get inside the federal building near downtown. City police declared a riot and ordered the crowd to disperse.

President Trump posted Saturday on social media that it was up to local law enforcement agencies to police protests in their cities. But he said he has instructed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to have federal agents be vigilant in guarding U.S. government facilities.

“Please be aware that I have instructed ICE and/or Border Patrol to be very forceful in this protection of Federal Government Property. There will be no spitting in the faces of our Officers, there will be no punching or kicking the headlights of our cars, and there will be no rock or brick throwing at our vehicles, or at our Patriot Warriors,” Trump wrote. “If there is, those people will suffer an equal, or more, consequence.”

Wilson said Portland would be imposing a fee on detention facilities that use chemical agents.

The federal government “must, and will, be held accountable,” the mayor said. “To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children.”

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that it will be a few days before a government funding package comes up for a vote, all but ensuring the partial federal shutdown will drag into the week as Democrats and Republicans debate reining in the Trump administration’s divisive immigration enforcement operations.

Johnson signaled he is relying on help from President Trump to ensure passage. Trump struck a deal with Democratic senators to separate out funding for the Department of Homeland Security from a broader package after public outrage over two shooting deaths during protests in Minneapolis against the immigration crackdown there. The measure approved Friday by the Senate would fund Homeland Security for two weeks, setting up a deadline for Congress to debate and vote on new restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

“The president is leading this,” Johnson (R-La.) said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“It’s his play call to do it this way,” the speaker said, adding that the Republican president has “already conceded that he wants to turn down the volume” on federal immigration operations.

Johnson faces a daunting challenge ahead, trying to muscle the funding legislation through the House while Democrats are refusing to provide the votes for speedy passage. They are demanding restraints on ICE that go beyond $20 million for body cameras that already is in the bill. They want to require that federal immigration agents unmask and identify themselves and are pressing for an end to roving patrols, amid other changes.

Democrats dig in on ICE changes

“What is clear is that the Department of Homeland Security needs to be dramatically reformed,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

Jeffries said the administration needs to begin negotiations now, not over the next two weeks, on changes to immigration enforcement operations.

“Masks should come off,” he said. “Judicial warrants should absolutely be required consistent with the Constitution, in our view, before DHS agents or ICE agents are breaking into the homes of the American people or ripping people out of their cars.”

It’s all forcing Johnson to rely on his slim House GOP majority — which will narrow further after a Democrat was elected to a vacant House seat in a Texas special election Saturday — in a series of procedural votes, starting in committee Monday and pushing a potential House floor vote on the package until at least Tuesday, he said.

House Democrats planned a private caucus call Sunday evening to assess the next steps.

Partial government shutdown drags on

Meanwhile, a number of other federal agencies are snared in the funding standoff as the government went into a partial shutdown over the weekend.

Defense, health, transportation and housing are among those that were given shutdown guidance by the administration, though many operations are deemed essential and services are not necessarily interrupted. Workers could go without pay if the impasse drags on. Some could be furloughed.

This is the second time in a matter of months that federal operations have been disrupted as Congress digs in, using the annual funding process as leverage to extract policy changes. In the fall, Democrats sparked what became the longest federal shutdown in history, 43 days, as they protested the expiration of health insurance tax breaks.

That shutdown ended with a promise to vote on proposals to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. But the legislation did not advance and Democrats were unable to achieve their goal of keeping the subsidies in place. As a result, insurance premiums have soared in the new year for millions of people.

Trump wants quick end to shutdown

This time, the administration has signaled its interest in more quickly resolving the shutdown.

Johnson said he was in the Oval Office last week when Trump, along with border advisor Tom Homan, spoke with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York to work out the deal.

“I think we’re on the path to get agreement,” Johnson said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Body cameras for immigration agents, which are already provided for in the package, and an end to the roving patrols are areas of potential agreement, Johnson said.

But he said taking the masks off and putting names on agents’ uniforms could lead to problems for law enforcement officers as they are being targeted by the protesters and their personal information posted online.

“I don’t think the president would approve it — and he shouldn’t,” Johnson said on Fox.

Democrats, however, said the immigration operations are out of control, and it is an emergency situation that must end in Minneapolis and other cities.

Growing numbers of lawmakers are calling for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to be fired or impeached.

“What is happening in Minnesota right now is a dystopia,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who led efforts to hold the line for more changes.

“ICE is making this country less safe, not more safe today,” Murphy said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Our focus over the next two weeks has to be reining in a lawless and immoral immigration agency.”

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.

Los Angeles unions enjoy a decided “brand advantage” over corporations among city voters, and the labor movement should use that popularity to advance “union-led solutions” to key public policy issues in 2007, a memo written by top labor strategists says.

The two-page memo, which was obtained by The Times, argues for broader, more straightforward engagement on policy issues than many unions have undertaken in the past. Some labor leaders prefer to focus on their own contract issues, and even those who are active in politics often soft-pedal the “union” label.

The document demonstrates labor’s confidence as it heads into a new year of big battles over politics, contracts and organizing.

Labor is preparing to fight a referendum, which was qualified by the business community, to block an expansion of the city’s living wage ordinance. Civilian city employees, grocery store workers, security officers and teachers are seeking new union contracts, and hotel workers near the airport and truck drivers near the port are engaged in organizing drives.

The memo relies heavily on public opinion research conducted by a Democratic pollster, David Binder, including a survey of 800 city voters last fall. The document was written by three veteran strategists, John Hein, Bob Cherry and Don Attore, all of whom have retired from the political operation of the California Teachers Assn. The three work closely with Working Californians, a nonprofit research and advocacy group.

“There is a significant opportunity for organized labor in Los Angeles,” the memo says. “In particular, we’d highlight these factors: unions’ fundamentally positive image and ‘brand advantage’ over business corporations; the overlap between union priorities and the key concerns of voters across the electorate in L.A., and the opportunity to expand public understanding of the connection between local government and the full range of quality-of-life issues.”

Gary Toebben, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, said that unions, to the extent that they engage in policy issues, “are copying the Chamber of Commerce…. For other groups to want to be involved in efforts to build a better community, I say we welcome them to the cause that we have been championing.”

Toebben and other leaders of Los Angeles’ business community are focusing on a referendum to block a new law, which is heavily backed by labor, to expand the city’s living wage ordinance to cover workers at airport-area hotels. The success of the referendum, which probably will appear on the ballot in May, is crucial to persuading businesses to come to Los Angeles, expand and create jobs, he said.

Asked at a news conference last week about whether the referendum was wise given labor’s growing strength in the city, Toebben said it would be wrong to “just let the bulldozer run over you.”

Binder’s poll found that unions have more public support in Los Angeles than in other areas of the state and country. Among city voters surveyed, 55% agreed that “without unions, there would be no middle-class left in America.”

Reflecting the labor movement’s influence in city politics, the memo argues for talking up local government’s ability to deal with issues such as the economy, healthcare and the environment, which generally are considered federal and state matters.

The memo calls “for a public education campaign focused on union-led solutions to the quality-of-life issues that Los Angeles voters regard as most important.” The memo suggests that such a campaign be conducted before 2008, when state and national election campaigns will probably consume union energy.

“Los Angeles, against its own history, is a labor town now,” said Cherry, one of the strategists, who was a key figure in the successful effort to defeat Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s slate of ballot initiatives in 2005. “One of the things that comes through in the poll is that people really see the potential of unions to take up the cause of ordinary people on quality-of-life issues.”

Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian and UC Santa Barbara professor, said he had “a certain admiration” for unions involving themselves more in policy issues, though he wonders if the public may prove skeptical.

In the long term, “this is the way that unions will make a breakthrough — when people see that solutions to society-wide questions are part of a labor agenda,” he said.

Binder’s polling suggests that any attempts by business to challenge union priorities will not be easy. Seventy-three percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement: “Big corporations are taking advantage of people like you.” Sixty-one percent of the Angelenos surveyed believe that oil companies are manipulating oil prices, including reducing prices during election times to keep supportive politicians in office.

Maria Elena Durazo, the leader of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, was briefed on the polling. She said in an interview that in 2007, she wanted to continue to organize workers while looking for opportunities to take on “the greediness of the corporations, which is pretty clear and pretty blatant.”

“Strategically, we just don’t take on everything that’s out there,” she said. “We’ve tried to put our resources in places where they make a difference.”

Dan Schnur, a Republican political consultant who teaches at USC, said that a public education campaign might be particularly effective this year, when no state or federal elections are scheduled.

“The best time to reach the voters with any type of argument is when their guard is down,” Schnur said. “The closer you get to an election, the more difficult it is to get through to people, but having this discussion in an off-year makes it much easier to get your message through.”

*

joe.mathews@latimes.com

Reporting from Sacramento — Soda companies got a respite last week from battling local taxes on sugary beverages, after California lawmakers grudgingly passed a 12-year ban on cities and counties imposing the levies.

That reprieve might be short-lived.

Major healthcare groups announced Monday that they will pursue a statewide soda tax initiative on the 2020 ballot to pay for public health programs. And in another jab at the beverage industry, the initiative would enshrine in the California Constitution the right of local governments to impose soda taxes.

“Big Soda has been a major contributor to the alarming rise in obesity and diabetes,” said Dustin Corcoran, chief executive of the California Medical Assn., a principal backer of the initiative. “We need to address this crisis now, and this initiative gives voters a real opportunity to do that.”

The proposed 2-cents-per-fluid-ounce tax would mean an additional 24 cents tacked onto the cost of a 12-ounce can, or an extra $1.34 for a 2-liter bottle sold in the state.

The proposal sets the stage for a marquee statewide battle between health groups and the soda industry — a feud that has been simmering in California’s cities and counties for years and burst into full view in the state Capitol last week.

California bans local soda taxes »

With the battle lines forming for 2020, the soda industry has had little time to savor its recent victory.

The companies won a 12-year ban on local soda taxes from legislators in exchange for a promise from business groups to withdraw a ballot initiative that would have required cities and counties to get supermajority approval from voters to raise any new taxes. That initiative, which had qualified for the November ballot, panicked mayors and labor groups representing local government workers with the prospect of a higher vote threshold that could stymie efforts to collect new tax revenue for cities and counties.

Minutes after Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill that contained the soda tax ban, proponents pulled their broader tax initiative from the ballot.

The eleventh-hour deal infuriated public health groups and a number of legislative Democrats, who likened the soda industry’s leverage play to “extortion.”

“We were disappointed that the American Beverage Assn., and their member companies, went to such great lengths to take away the right of Californians to vote for better health,” said Nancy Brown, chief executive of the American Heart Assn.

But the maneuver prodded the California medical and dental associations to respond. The initiative, according to proponents, would raise between $1.7 billion and $1.9 billion in a statewide levy on soda and other sugary beverages, with money going toward programs to combat and prevent diabetes and obesity — both commonly linked to consumption of those drinks.

The tax would not apply to diet sodas, fruit and vegetable juices with no added sugar and drinks in which milk is the primary ingredient.

“Big Soda may have won a cynical short-term victory but, for the sake of our children’s health, we cannot and will not allow them to undermine California’s long-term commitment to healthcare and disease prevention,” Corcoran and Carrie Gordon, chief strategy officer of the California Dental Assn., said in a statement.

Brown of the American Heart Assn. said her group backs a statewide tax and efforts to roll back the local ban.

“We will be relentless in our work with communities across the state to improve public health through a statewide tax, and to restore the rights of Californians to vote for what they believe best supports health in their state,” she said.

The two organizations partnered with other public health groups, along with the Service Employees International Union, to successfully raise tobacco taxes by $2 per pack in 2016.

“Everyday grocery shoppers in California are struggling with affordability in the state — from housing to transportation to taxes. Rather than further driving up costs at the supermarket, we believe there is a better way for health advocates, government and California’s beverage companies to work together to help people reduce sugar consumption while at the same time protecting consumers’ pocketbooks and the small businesses that are so vital to our communities,” said William M. Dermody Jr., spokesman for the American Beverage Assn.

The soda industry has long fended off taxes at the state and local level. Berkeley became the first to pass a tax in November 2014 and since then, three other Bay Area cities — San Francisco, Oakland, and Albany — have imposed their own levies.

Until recently, the battle over a statewide soda tax had been fought — and won — by the industry in the Legislature. A recent legislative analysis counted proposals dating back to 1983 that had fizzled at some point during negotiations in Sacramento.

One recent effort was a 2013 bill by state Sen. Bill Monning (D-Carmel) to impose a penny-per-ounce tax, half the size of the tax under the proposed initiative. Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica) sought a 2 cent-per-ounce tax in two successive bills in 2015 and 2016; both measures failed to advance.

“These products are dangerous,” Monning said last week during Senate debate over the bill that now bans local soda taxes. “We label and tax tobacco because we know what it does. We should label and tax these products and let people have informed choice.”

Times staff writer John Myers contributed to this report.

Coverage of California politics »

melanie.mason@latimes.com

Follow @melmason on Twitter for the latest on California politics.

FORT WORTH — Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a reliably Republican state Senate district in Texas in Saturday’s special election, continuing a string of surprise victories for Democrats across the U.S. in the year since President Trump returned to the White House.

Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called it “a wake-up call for Republicans across Texas,” where the GOP controls every statewide office.

“Our voters cannot take anything for granted,” Patrick wrote on X, while noting low-turnout special elections are always unpredictable. “I know the energy and strength the Republican grassroots in Texas possess. We will come out fighting with a new resolve, and we will take this seat back in November.”

Rehmet, a labor union leader and veteran, easily defeated Republican Leigh Wambsganss, a conservative activist, in the Fort Worth-area district, which Trump had won by 17 points in 2024. With almost all votes counted, Rehmet was leading by more than 14 percentage points — a more than 30-point swing.

“This win goes to everyday working people,” Rehmet told supporters.

Rehmet’s victory added to Democrats’ record of overperforming in special elections so far this cycle, beginning in March — when they prevailed in a Pennsylvania legislative district made up of suburbanites and farmers that Democrats hadn’t held in a century — and continuing through November, when they dominated candidate and ballot contests from Maine to California. Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, was elected mayor of New York City, a Democratic stronghold that saw the highest voter turnout in a mayor’s race in 50 years.

The showings come as Trump’s approval ratings hover around or below 40%. A January AP-NORC poll found that a majority of U.S. adults disapprove of the way he’s handling foreign policy, trade negotiations and immigration, as well as the economy.

Democrats said Saturday’s results in Texas were further evidence that voters under the second Trump administration are motivated to reject GOP candidates and their policies.

Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said Rehmet won by standing with working people and talking to Texans about the future.

“This win shows what is possible in Texas with strong organizing, great candidates and strategic investments,” he said in a statement. “People are noticing that Democrats have the workers’ backs and are delivering results.”

Democrats’ other recent state victories included wins for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and in special elections in Kentucky and Iowa. And, while Republican Matt Van Epps won a Tennessee special election for a U.S. House seat, the relatively slim margin of victory gave Democrats hope in the district for this fall’s midterms.

With that backdrop in mind, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have pushed states to redraw their political maps to Republicans’ advantage headed into those contests, which will determine partisan control in Washington. Some Democratic states — most notably California — have countered with their own redistricting efforts.

The Texas Senate seat was open because the four-term GOP incumbent, Kelly Hancock, resigned to take a statewide office. Hancock easily won election each time he ran for the office, and Republicans have held the seat for decades.

The district is redder than its home county, Tarrant. Trump won the county by 5 points in 2024, but Democrat Joe Biden carried it in 2020 by about 1,800 votes out of more than 834,000 cast.

Trump posted about the race on his social media platform earlier Saturday, urging voters to get out to support Wambsganss. He called her a successful entrepreneur and “an incredible supporter” of his “Make America Great Again” movement.

Rehmet had support from national organizations including VoteVets, a veterans group that said it spent $500,000 on ads. Rehmet, who served in the Air Force and works as a machinist, campaigned on lowering costs, supporting public education and protecting jobs.

Wambsganss warned her party not to be complacent.

“The Democrats were energized,” she said in a statement. “Too many Republicans stayed home.”

Rehmet’s victory allows him to serve until early January, and he will face Wambganss again in the November general election to try to keep the seat for a full four-year term. The Texas Legislature is not set to reconvene until 2027, and the GOP still will have a comfortable majority.

Hanna and Smyth write for the Associated Press.

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, who were detained by immigration officers in Minnesota and held at an ICE facility in Texas, have been released a day after judge’s order, which excoriated the Trump administration for its conduct in the case. They have returned to Minnesota, according to the office of Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro.

The two were detained in a Minneapolis suburb on Jan. 20. He and his father were taken to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas.

Katherine Schneider, a spokesperson for Castro, a Democrat, confirmed that the two had arrived home. She said Castro picked them up from Dilley on Saturday night and escorted them home Sunday to Minnesota.

The Associated Press emailed the Department of Homeland Security for comment on the father and son’s release. There was no immediate response.

Images of the young boy wearing a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack and surrounded by immigration officers drew outrage about the Trump administration’s crackdown in Minneapolis.

Neighbors and school officials say that federal immigration officers used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer. The Department of Homeland Security has rejected that description. It said the father fled on foot and left the boy in a running vehicle in their driveway.

Castro wrote a letter to Liam while they were on the plane to Minnesota, in which he told the young boy he has “moved the world.”

“Your family, school and many strangers said prayers for you and offered whatever they could do to see you back home,” Castro wrote. A photo of the letter was posted on social media. “Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t your home. America became the most powerful, prosperous nation on earth because of immigrants not in spite of them.”

In a social media post, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) welcomed the boy back to Minnesota, saying that he “should be in school and with family — not in detention,” adding, “Now ICE needs to leave.”

SACRAMENTO — As massive federal cuts are upending the healthcare system in California, analysts and healthcare professionals are urging state lawmakers to soften the blow by creating new revenue streams and helping residents navigate through the newly-imposed red tape.

“It impacts not only uninsured but also Medicare and commercially insured patients who rely on the same system,” said Dolly Goel, a physician and chief officer for the Santa Clara Valley Healthcare Administration. “People will die.”

Goel was among more than a dozen speakers this week at a state Assembly Health Committee hearing held to collect input on how to address cuts enacted by a Republican-backed tax and spending bill signed last year by President Trump. The committee’s Republican members — Assemblymembers Phillip Chen of Yorba Linda, Natasha Johnson of Lake Elsinore, Joe Patterson of Rockin, and Kate Sanchez of Trabuco Canyon — did not attend.

The so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed by Republicans shifts federal funding away from safety-net programs and toward tax cuts and immigration enforcement. A recent report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which advises the state Legislature on budgetary issues, estimated this will reduce funding for healthcare by “tens of billions of dollars” in California and warned about 1.2 million people could lose coverage through Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the federal Medicaid program providing healthcare coverage to low-income Americans.

Congress allowed enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, which is dramatically increasing the cost of privately-purchased health insurance. Covered California, the state’s Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplace, estimates hundreds of thousands of Californians will either be stripped of coverage or drop out due to increased cost.

Sandra Hernández, president of the California Health Care Foundation, said the federal legislation creates administrative hurdles, requiring Medicaid beneficiaries to meet new work or income requirements and to undergo the eligibility re-determination process every six months instead of annually.

“We are looking at a scenario where otherwise eligible working parents lose their coverage simply because they aren’t able to navigate a complex verification process in a timely way,” she said.

California should move aggressively to automate verification instead of putting the burden of proof on beneficiaries, Hernández said. She advised legislators to center new healthcare strategies around technology, like artificial intelligence and telehealth services, to improve efficiency and keep costs down.

“While the federal landscape has shifted, California has enormous power to mitigate the damage,” said Hernández. “California has had a long tradition of taking care of its own.”

Hannah Orbach-Mandel, an analyst with the California Budget and Policy Center, said legislators should establish new revenue sources.

“A common sense place to start is by eliminating corporate tax loopholes and ensuring that highly profitable corporations pay their fair share in state taxes,” she said, adding that California loses out on billions annually because of the “water’s edge” tax provision, which allows multinational corporations to exclude the income of their foreign subsidiaries from state taxation.

One proposal to raise money for state healthcare benefits already is raising controversy. Under the Billionaire Tax Act, Californians worth more than $1 billion would pay a one-time 5% tax on their total wealth. The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, the union behind the act, said the measure would raise much-needed money for healthcare, education and food assistance programs. It is opposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, among others.

During last week’s legislative hearing in Sacramento, other speakers stressed the importance of communicating clearly with the public, collaborating with nonprofits and county governments and bracing for an influx of hospital patients.

Those who lose health insurance will skip medications and primary care and subsequently get sicker and end up in the emergency room, explained Goel. She said this will strain hospital staff and lead to longer wait times and delayed care for all patients.

The federal cuts come at a time when California is struggling with its own budgetary woes. The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates the state will have an $18-billion budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year.

At the start of the hearing, Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Alameda) criticized the federal government for leaving states in the lurch and prioritizing immigration enforcement over healthcare.

The Republican-led Congress and the president provided a staggering funding increase to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. The agency’s annual budget has ballooned to $85 billion.

“The federal dollars which once supported healthcare for working families are now being funneled into mass deportation operations,” said Bonta, who chairs the committee. “Operations that resulted in tragic murders — this is where our healthcare funding is going.”

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Gavin Newsom was in his element, moving and shaking amid the rich and powerful in Davos.

He scolded European leaders for supposedly cowering before President Trump.

He drew disparaging notice during a presidential rant and captured headlines after being blocked from delivering a high-profile speech, allegedly at the behest of the White House.

All the while, another governor and Democratic presidential prospect was mixing and mingling in the rarefied Swiss air — though you probably wouldn’t know it.

Flying far below the heat-seeking radar, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear leaned into the role of economic ambassador, focusing on job creation and other nutsy, boltsy stuff that doesn’t grab much notice in today’s performative political environment.

Like Newsom, Beshear is running-but-not-exactly-running for president. He didn’t set out to offer a stark contrast to California’s governor, the putative 2028 Democratic front-runner. But he’s doing so just the same.

Want someone who’ll match Trump insult for insult, over-the-top meme for over-the-top meme and howl whenever the president commits some new outrage? Look to Sacramento, not Frankfort.

“I think by the time we reach 2028, our Democratic voters are gonna be worn out,” Beshear said during a conversation in his state’s snowy capital. “They’re gonna be worn out by Trump, and they’re gonna be worn out by Democrats who respond to Trump like Trump. And they’re gonna want some stability in their lives.”

Every candidate enters a contest with a backstory and a record, which is condensed to a summary that serves as calling card, strategic foundation and a rationale for their run.

Here’s Andy Beshear’s: He’s the popular two-term governor of a red state that three times voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

He is fluent in the language of faith, well-liked by the kind of rural voters who have abandoned Democrats in droves and, at age 48, offers a fresh face and relative youth in a party that many voters have come to see as old and ossified.

The fact he’s from the South, where Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton emerged the last time Democrats experienced this kind of existential freak-out, also doesn’t hurt.

Beshear’s not-yet-candidacy, still in the fledgling phase, offers a mix of aspiration and admonition.

Democrats, he said, need to talk more like regular people. Addiction, not substance use disorder. Hunger, not food assistance.

And, he suggested, they need to focus more on things regular people care about: jobs, healthcare, public safety, public education. Things that aren’t theoretical or abstract but materially affect their daily lives, like the costs of electricity, car insurance and groceries.

“I think the most important thing we should have learned from 2024 is [Democratic voters are] gonna be looking for somebody that can help them pay that next bill,” Beshear said.

He was seated in the Old Governor’s Mansion, now a historic site and Beshear’s temporary office while the nearby Capitol undergoes a years-long renovation.

The red-brick residence, built in the Federal style and completed in 1798, was Beshear’s home from age 6 to 10 when his father, Steve, lived there while serving as lieutenant governor. (Steve Beshear went on to serve two terms as the state’s chief executive, building a brand and a brand name that helped Andy win his first public office, attorney general, in 2015.)

It was 9 degrees outside. Icicles hung from the eaves and snowplows navigated Frankfort’s narrow, winding streets after an unusually cold winter blast.

Inside, Beshear was seated before an unlit fireplace, legs crossed, shirt collar unbuttoned, looking like the pleasantly unassuming Dad in a store-bought picture frame.

He bragged a bit, touting Kentucky’s economic success under his watch. He spoke of his religiosity — his grandfather and great-grandfather were Baptist preachers — and talked at length about the optimism, a political rarity these days, that undergirds his vision for the country.

“I think the American people feel like the pendulum swung too far in the Biden administration. Now they feel it’s swung way too far during the Trump administration,” Beshear said. “What they want is for it to stop swinging.”

He went on. “Most people when they wake up aren’t thinking about politics. They’re thinking about their job, their next doctor’s appointment, the roads and bridges they drive, the school they drop their kids off at, and whether they feel safe in their community.

“And I think they desperately want someone that can move the country, not right or left ideologically, but actually forward in those areas. And that’s how I think we heal.”

Beshear doesn’t shy from his Democratic pedigree, or stray from much of the party’s orthodoxy.

Seeking reelection in 2023, he seized on the abortion issue and the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade to batter and best his Republican opponent.

He’s walked the picket line with striking auto workers, signed an executive order making Juneteenth a state holiday and routinely vetoed anti-gay legislation, becoming the first Kentucky governor to attend an LGBTQ+ celebration in the Capitol Rotunda.

“Discrimination against our LGBTQ+ community is unacceptable,” he told an audience. “It holds us back and, in my Kentucky accent, it ain’t right.”

For all of that, Beshear doesn’t shrink from taking on Trump, which, essentially, has become a job requirement for any Democratic officeholder wishing to remain a Democratic officeholder.

After the president’s rambling Davos address, Beshear called Trump’s remarks “dangerous, disrespectful and unhinged.”

“From insulting our allies to telling struggling Americans that he’s fixed inflation and the economy is amazing, the President is hurting both our families’ financial security and our national security,” Beshear posted on social media. “Oh, and Greenland is so important he’s calling it Iceland.”

But Beshear hasn’t turned Trump-bashing into a 24/7 vocation, or a weight-lifting contest where the winner is the critic wielding the heaviest bludgeon.

“I stand up to him in the way that I think a Democratic governor of Kentucky should. When he’s doing things that hurt my state, I speak out,” Beshear said. “I filed 20 lawsuits, I think, and we’ve won almost all of them, bringing dollars they were trying to stop from flowing into Kentucky.

“But,” he added, “when he does something positive for Kentucky, I also say that too, because that’s what our people expect.”

Asked about the towel-snapping Newsom and his dedicated staff of Trump trollers, Beshear defended California’s governor — or, at least, passed on the chance to get in a dig.

“Gavin’s in a very different situation than I’m in. I mean, he has the president attacking him and his state just about every day,” Beshear said. “So I don’t want to be critical of an approach from somebody that’s in a very different spot.

“But the approach also has to be unique to you. For me, I bring people together. We’ve been able to do that in this state. That’s my approach. And in the end, I’ve gotta stay true to who I am.”

And when — or make that if — both Newsom and Beshear launch a formal bid for president, they’ll present Democratic voters a clear choice.

Not just between two differing personalities. Also two considerably different approaches to politics and winning back the White House.

How do you find the missing?

If you do find them, how can you help?

Oakland civil rights attorney James Cook has been on the ground in Minnesota for months figuring out answers to these question as he goes.

A fast-talking Minneapolis native who still lives in the Twin Cities part time, Cook is one of a handful of attorneys who have dropped everything to aid (for free) those caught up in the federal crackdown — protesters, immigrants and detained citizens — too many of whom have found themselves facing deportation, arrest or even been disappeared, at least for a time.

Civil rights attorney James Cook in the rear view mirror as he makes phone calls in his car in Minneapolis.

(Caroline Yang/For The Times)

“They are leaders that are on the ground really helping people through this process,” Minnesota school board member Chauntyll Allen told me.

She’s one of the protesters arrested inside a local church, charged with conspiracy to deprive others of their constitutional rights by Pam Bondi’s politicized Department of Justice, which also Friday arrested journalist Don Lemon for the same incident. Cook is one of the lawyers now representing Allen.

“It shows us that the judicial arm, or some of the judicial arm of our democracy, is willing to step up and ensure that our democracy stands strong,” Allen said of Cook and others like him.

While it’s the images of clashes in the streets that captivate media and audiences, it’s lawyers like Cook who are fighting an existential battle in the background to preserve the rule of law in a place where it is increasing opaque, to put it gently.

The legal work behind detentions has largely been an overlooked battlefield that will likely rage on years after ICE departs the streets, leaving in its wake hundreds if not thousands of long-and-winding court cases.

Beyond the personal fates they will determine, the outcome of the civil litigation Cook and others are spearheading will likely force whatever transparency and accountability can be pulled from these chaotic and troubling times.

It’s time-consuming and complicated work vital not just to people, but history.

Or, as Cook puts it, “I’ll be 10 years older when all this s— resolves.”

Federal agents stand guard against a growing wall of protesters on Jan. 24 in Minneapolis, just hours after Alex Pretti was shot by federal agents.

(Caroline Yang/For The Times)

Cook told me this while on his way to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building where some detainees are being held, maybe. It’s hard to find out. A few years ago, when immigration enforcement in Minnesota ramped up under the first Trump term, activists tried to get the name of the building changed, arguing Whipple, the first Protestant Episcopal bishop in the state, had been an advocate of the marginalized and wouldn’t want his name associated with what the feds were up to.

It didn’t work, but the movement’s slogan, “What would Whipple do?” still has resonance in this town, where two American citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, have been fatally shot while protesting — incidents ugly enough that Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about them.

Cook is well aware that the guns carried by the federal agents are not for show, even without the Boss’ new ballad. Just a few days ago, one of the first times he drove his beat-up truck up to the gate, the federal guards at Whipple pointed their guns at him.

“I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m going to take my keys out of the ignition, drop them on the ground. So please don’t shoot,’” he said.

They lowered the guns, but Cook was scared, a feeling that doesn’t come easy.

Long before his law degree, when he was a punk-rock loving teen in the 1980s, fresh out of Southwest High, the public school not too far from Whipple, a former coach convinced him to give up college dreams and instead pursue a shot at making the first Muay Thai kickboxing team at the Olympics.

The martial art ended up not making it as an official Olympic sport, but the experience launched Cook into a professional boxing and kickboxing career that took him to competitions around the world, and taught him fear is not a reason to back down.

But, “Father Time is undefeated,” Cook said. “I got older and I started losing fights, and I was like, all right, time to get back to life.”

That eventually led him to obtaining a law degree in San Francisco, where after an intern stint as a public defender, he decided he wanted to be a trial attorney, fighting in court.

Civil rights attorney James Cook has been doing pro bono immigration work since the crackdown began in Minneapolis.

(Caroline Yang/For The Times)

He started cold-calling John Burris, another Bay Area lawyer who is an icon of civil rights and police misconduct cases. Burris, who has been called the “Godfather of Police Litigation,” was involved in the “Oakland Riders” case in 2000, when officers were discovered to have planted evidence. He also represented Rodney King, the family of Oscar Grant, and the family of Joseph Mann among many others.

But Burris, a boxing fan, didn’t respond to Cook’s calls until the young lawyer offered him free tickets to one of his fights, which he was still doing on the side.

“And then immediately I got a call back,” Cook said.

Burris said Cook’s history as a fighter intrigued him, but “I did say to James, you can’t be a fighter and lawyer. You can’t get punched in your head all the time.”

Cook did not take this advice.

Still, Burris said, “It was his persistence that I admired, because the type of work we’re involved in, you need people who are dedicated, who have some real commitment to the work, and he showed that kind of consistency and dedication.”

Cook’s been working with Burris more than 20 years now, but until recently, the labyrinth of the immigration system wasn’t his area of expertise. It’s been a crash course for him, he said, on the often arcane laws that govern who gets to stay in America and who doesn’t.

It’s also been a crash course on what a civil rights emergency looks like. Along with his work looking for locked-up immigrants, Cook spends a lot of time on the streets at protests, helping people understand their rights — and limitations — and seeing first hand what is happening.

“If you ever wondered what you would have done in Germany, now is the time,” he said. “Now is the time to do something. People are being interned.”

In the hours after Pretti was shot, Cook was at the location of the shooting, in the middle of the tear gas, offering legal help to anyone who needed it and bearing witness to conduct that will almost certainly face scrutiny one day, even if government leaders condone it now.

Law enforcement officers launch tear gas canisters as they work to push the crowd back and expand their perimeter in Minneapolis on Jan. 24.

(Caroline Yang/For The Times)

“The way the officers chase people down, protesters who were really just protesting lawfully and were beaten and pepper sprayed and gassed — all those are civil rights violations,” Burris said. “And so the law is the guardrails. So there has to be lawyers who are prepared to protect those guardrails and to stand as centurions, as I refer to us.”

Cook has tried to calm protesters, he told me, and prevent clashes. But people are mad, and resolute. His greatest fear is summer — when warm weather could bring even larger crowds if enforcement is still ongoing. He’s worried that the actions of the federal agents will spill over into anger at local cops enforcing local laws, leading to even more chaos.

“I’ve always supported cops as long as they do their job correctly,” Cook said.

For now, he’s taking it one day at a time, one case at a time, one name at a time.

Protesters raise an inverted American flag as law enforcement officers launch tear gas canisters in Minneapolis after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents.

(Caroline Yang/For The Times)

Tuesday, Cook passed through the armed checkpoint at Whipple carrying a list of about seven people, folks who have been picked up by federal agents for one reason or another, or reasons unknown, and now cannot be located. They are not in the public online system that is meant to track detainees, and family and friends have not heard from them.

If he’s lucky, Cook will get information on one or two, that they are indeed inside, or maybe at a detention center in Texas, where many have been sent. But there will be more whose location remains unknown. He’ll make calls, fill out forms and come back tomorrow. And the tomorrow after that.

“This is what we do,” he said. “I’m always in it for the long run. I mean, you know, shoot, yeah, that’s kind of the way it works.”

ATLANTA — It is a goal spreading among anti-tax crusaders — eliminate all property taxes on homeowners.

Rising property values have inflated tax bills in many states, but ending all homeowner taxes would cost billions or even tens of billions in most states. It is unclear whether lawmakers can pull it off without harming schools and local governments that rely on the taxes to provide services.

Officials in North Dakota say they are on their way, using state oil money. Wednesday, Republicans in the Georgia House unveiled a complex effort to phase out homeowner property taxes by 2032. In Florida, GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis says that is his goal, with lawmakers considering phasing out nonschool property taxes on homeowners over 10 years. And in Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott says he wants to eliminate property taxes for schools.

Republicans are echoing those who say taxes, especially when the tax collector can seize a house for nonpayment, mean no one truly owns property.

“No one should ever face the loss of their home because they can’t pay rent to the government,” Georgia Republican House Speaker Jon Burns of Newington said Wednesday.

An election-year tax revolt

These audacious election-year efforts could be joined by ballot initiatives in Oklahoma and Ohio to eliminate all property taxes. Such initiatives were defeated in North Dakota in 2024 and failed to make the ballot in Nebraska that year, although organizers there are trying again. Another initiative in Michigan may also fail to make the ballot.

“We’re very much in this property tax revolt era, which is not unique, it’s not new. We’ve seen these revolts in the past,” said Manish Bhatt, vice president of state tax policy at the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C., group that is generally skeptical of new taxes.

Previous backlashes led to laws like California’s Proposition 13, a 1978 initiative that limited property tax rates and how much local governments could increase property valuations for tax purposes.

The efforts are aimed at voters like Tim Hodnett, a 65-year-old retiree in suburban Atlanta’s Lawrenceville. Hodnett’s annual property tax bill rose from $2,000 to $3,000 between 2018 and 2024. He sees those figures starkly because he paid off his mortgage years ago, and he pays his taxes all at once instead of making monthly payments.

Hodnett said he is disabled and living on $30,000 a year. He is about to get a big property tax break, because seniors in Gwinnett County are exempt from school property taxes, about two-thirds of his bill. But he would love not to pay that other $1,000.

“It would be nice to be exempt from property taxes,” Hodnett said.

Will there be replacement revenue?

The question is whether local governments and K-12 schools should be expected to cut spending, or whether they will be allowed to make up revenue from some other source.

“I think the complete elimination of the property tax for homeowners is really going to be very difficult in most states and localities around the country, and undesirable in most places,” said Adam Langley of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a Massachusetts nonprofit that studies land use and taxation.

Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, a Republican, has been touring the state arguing that local governments are overspending, trying to show they don’t need the $19 billion in property taxes they collect from homeowners for whom the property is their primary residence. Local governments have been disputing those figures.

North Dakota is using earnings from the state’s $13.4-billion oil tax savings account to gradually wipe out homeowner property taxes. Last year, North Dakota’s Republican-controlled Legislature expanded its primary residence tax credit from $500 to $1,600 a year. Officials in December said the tax credit wiped out property taxes for 50,000 households last year and reduced bills for nearly 100,000 more. That cost $400 million in state subsidies for the 2025 and 2026 tax years.

“It works, and we know we can build on it to provide even more relief and get property taxes to zero for the vast majority of North Dakota homeowners,” Republican Gov. Kelly Armstrong said.

The situation is murkier in Texas, which has been using state surplus funds to finance property tax reductions, and under the Georgia proposal, which calls for shifting taxes around.

A shift from property to sales taxes

Burns wants Georgia to wipe out $5.2 billion in homeowner property taxes — more than a quarter of the $19.9 billion in property taxes collected in 2024 — telling cities, counties and school districts to fall back on current or new sales taxes.

Not only will Burns’ plan need the Republican-led Senate to agree, but it will require Democratic support to meet the two-thirds hurdle for a state constitutional amendment and then voter approval in November.

While most property taxes go to schools, the majority of sales taxes don’t in some communities. It is unclear whether localities would redivide sales taxes. Also, local governments and schools would remain limited to a combined 5% sales tax rate, atop the state’s 4% rate. Some schools and governments might not be able to raise sales taxes enough to recover lost revenue.

Georgia would go from currently shielding $5,000 in home value from taxation to $150,000 in 2031 before abolishing most homeowner property taxes in 2032. The plan would limit yearly property tax revenue growth to 3% on other kinds of property.

Local governments would able to send homeowners a yearly bill for specified services such as garbage pickup, street lighting, stormwater control and fire protection, but lawmakers aren’t calling that a tax. Voters could also approve assessments for government or school improvements. Authors said they haven’t decided whether property owners could lose homes for unpaid assessments.

Burns also wants to spend about $1 billion to cut property tax bills in 2026, but it is unclear whether Republican Gov. Brian Kemp will agree. A spokesperson declined to comment.

Georgia previously tried to limit how much home values could rise for tax purposes, one common approach nationwide. But a majority of school districts and many other local governments have opted out. Georgia’s senators are still pursuing that approach, with a Senate committee on Wednesday voting to make the limit mandatory.

Amy writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Jack Dura in Bismarck, N.D., contributed to this report.

HOUSTON — Democrat Christian Menefee won a Texas U.S. House seat in a Saturday special election that will further narrow Republicans’ slim majority.

Menefee, the Harris County attorney, prevailed in a runoff against fellow Democrat Amanda Edwards, a former Houston City Council member. He will replace the late Rep. Sylvester Turner, a former Houston mayor, who died in March 2025.

The seat representing the heavily Democratic Houston-based district has been vacant for nearly a year.

Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott didn’t schedule the first round of voting until November. Menefee and Edwards were the top vote-getters in a 16-candidate, all-parties primary. They advanced to a runoff because no candidate won a majority of the vote.

Abbott argued that Houston officials needed the six months between Turner’s death and the first round of voting to prepare for the special election, but Democrats criticized the long wait as a move designed to give the GOP a slightly bigger cushion in the House for difficult votes. The 18th District is safely Democratic with minority residents making up most of the voters.

Menefee, 37, was endorsed by several prominent Texas Democrats including former presidential candidate and congressman Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Jasmine Crockett. He was joined Saturday by Crockett, who is running for the U.S. Senate.

“I”m looking to bring a fight to Washington, D.C., and I need your help to do it,” he said as he stood beside Crockett in a social media video.

Menefee ousted an incumbent in 2020 to become Harris County’s first Black county attorney, representing it in civil cases, and he has joined legal challenges of President Trump’s executive orders on immigration.

Edwards served four years on the Houston City Council starting in 2016. She ran for U.S. Senate in 2020 but finished fifth in a 12-person primary. She unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in the 2024 primary, and when Lee died that July, local Democrats narrowly nominated Turner over Edwards as Lee’s replacement.

Menefee finished ahead of Edwards in the primary, but Edwards picked up the endorsement of the third-place finisher, state Rep. Jolanda Jones, who said Edwards had skills “best suited to go against Trump.”

After Saturday, yet another election lies ahead in little over a month. Menefee and Edwards are on the ballot again on March 3, when they will face Democratic Rep. Al Green in another election — this one a Democratic primary in a newly drawn 18th Congressional District, for the full term that starts in 2027.

GOP lawmakers who control Texas state government drew a new map last summer for this year’s midterms, pushed by Trump to create five more winnable seats for Republicans to help preserve their majority.

Winter weather added to voters’ confusion, forcing local officials to cancel two days of advance voting this week, prompting civil rights group to go to court to win a two-day extension, into Thursday.

Hanna writes for the Associated Press.

NEW YORK — Newly disclosed U.S. government files on Jeffrey Epstein have prompted the resignation of a top official in Slovakia and revived calls in Britain for former Prince Andrew to share what he knows with authorities about Epstein’s links to powerful individuals around the world.

The fallout comes a day after the Justice Department began releasing a massive trove of files that offers more details about Epstein’s interactions with the rich and famous after he served time for sex crimes in Florida.

The prime minister of Slovakia accepted the resignation Saturday of his national security advisor, Miroslav Lajcak, the country’s former foreign minister who once had a yearlong term as president of the U.N. General Assembly. Lajcak wasn’t accused of wrongdoing but left his position after photos and emails revealed he had met with Epstein in the years after the disgraced financier was released from jail.

The disclosures also have revived questions about whether longtime Epstein friend Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, should cooperate with U.S. authorities investigating Epstein.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Saturday suggested Mountbatten-Windsor should tell American investigators whatever he knows about Epstein’s activities. The former prince has so far ignored a request from members of the U.S. House Oversight Committee for a “transcribed interview” about his “long-standing friendship” with Epstein.

President Trump’s Justice Department said Friday it had released more than 3 million pages of documents along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images under a law intended to reveal the material it collected during two decades of investigations of Epstein, once a close friend of Trump.

The files, posted to the department’s website, included documents involving Epstein’s friendship with Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein’s email correspondence with longtime Trump advisor and former White House aide Stephen K. Bannon, New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch and other prominent contacts with people in political, business and philanthropic circles, including billionaires Elon Musk — another former Trump advisor — and Bill Gates.

Other documents offered a window into various investigations, including ones that led to sex trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019 and his accomplice and longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, and an earlier inquiry that found evidence of Epstein abusing underage girls but never led to federal charges.

Slovakian official resigns

Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, said Saturday that he had accepted Lajcak’s resignation.

Lajcak hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing, but emails showed that Epstein had invited him to dinner and other meetings in 2018.

The records also include a March 2018 email from Epstein’s office to former Obama White House general counsel Kathy Ruemmler, inviting her to a get-together with Epstein, Lajcak and Bannon, the conservative activist who was Trump’s White House strategist in 2017.

Lajcak said his contacts with Epstein were part of his diplomatic duties. Pressure mounted for his ouster from opposition parties and a nationalist partner in Fico’s governing coalition.

Draft indictment detailed Epstein’s abuse

The FBI started investigating Epstein in July 2006 and agents expected him to be indicted in May 2007, according to the newly released records. A prosecutor wrote up a proposed indictment after multiple underage girls told police and the FBI that they had been paid to give Epstein sexualized massages.

The draft indicated prosecutors were preparing to charge not just Epstein but also three people who worked for him as personal assistants.

According to interview notes released Friday, an employee at Epstein’s Florida estate told the FBI in 2007 that Epstein once had him buy flowers and deliver them to a student at Royal Palm Beach High School to commemorate her performance in a school play.

The employee, whose name was blacked out, said some of his duties were fanning $100 bills on a table near Epstein’s bed, placing a gun between the mattresses in his bedroom and cleaning up after Epstein’s frequent massages with young girls, including disposing of used condoms.

Ultimately, the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time, Alexander Acosta, signed off on a deal that let Epstein avoid federal prosecution. Epstein pleaded guilty instead to a state charge of soliciting prostitution from someone under age 18 and got an 18-month jail sentence. Acosta was Trump’s first Labor secretary in his first White House term.

Epstein offers to set Andrew up on a date

The records have thousands of references to Trump, including emails in which Epstein and others shared news articles, commented on his policies or gossiped about him and his family.

Mountbatten-Windsor’s name appears at least several hundred times, including in Epstein’s private emails. In a 2010 exchange, Epstein appeared to set him up for a date.

“I have a friend who I think you might enjoy having dinner with,” Epstein wrote.

Mountbatten-Windsor replied that he “would be delighted to see her.”

Epstein, whose emails often contain typographical errors, wrote later in the exchange: “She 26, russian, clevere beautiful, trustworthy and yes she has your email.”

Concerns over how Justice Department handled records

The Justice Department is facing criticism over how it handled the latest disclosure.

One group of Epstein accusers said in a statement that the new documents made it too easy to identify those he abused but not those who might have been involved in Epstein’s criminal activity.

“As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy,” it said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, pressed the department to let lawmakers review unredacted versions of the files as soon as Sunday. He said in a statement that Congress must assess whether the redactions were lawful or improperly shielded people from scrutiny.

Department officials have acknowledged that many records in its files are duplicates, and it was clear from the documents that reviewers took different degrees of care or exercised different standards while blacking out names and other identifying information.

There were multiple documents where a name was left exposed in one copy but redacted in another.

Epstein’s ties to powerful on display

The released records reinforced that Epstein was, at least before he ran into legal trouble, friendly with Trump and former President Clinton. None of Epstein’s victims who have gone public has accused Trump or Clinton of wrongdoing. Both men said they had no knowledge Epstein was abusing underage girls.

Epstein killed himself in a New York jail in August 2019, a month after being indicted.

In 2021, a federal jury in New York convicted Maxwell, a British socialite, of sex trafficking for helping recruit some of Epstein’s underage victims. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence. She was recently relocated to a less-restrictive lockup in Texas, which has drawn additional criticism of the Trump administration.

U.S. prosecutors never charged anyone else in connection with Epstein’s abuse. One victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, sued Mountbatten-Windsor, saying she had sexual encounters with him starting at age 17. The now-former prince denied having sex with Giuffre but settled her lawsuit for an undisclosed sum.

Giuffre died by suicide last year at age 41.

The Associated Press is reviewing the documents released by the Justice Department in collaboration with journalists from Versant, CBS and NBC. Journalists from each newsroom are working together to examine the files and share information about what is in them. Each outlet is responsible for its own independent news coverage of the documents.

Sisak, Kirka and Finley write for the Associated Press and reported from New York, London and Washington. AP journalists from around the country contributed to this report.