nomination

WASHINGTON — Dr. Nicole Saphier, President Trump ‘s third nominee for surgeon general, moved a step closer to confirmation after a Senate committee voted to advance her nomination on Wednesday.

Saphier, a radiologist and former Fox News Channel contributor, was advanced out of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on a 12 to 11 vote to serve as surgeon general after she was grilled at her confirmation hearing earlier this month about her stance on childhood vaccines.

She expressed support for vaccines and told lawmakers she didn’t believe they cause autism. The Trump administration has sought to revisit claims about a link between vaccines and autism, although widespread scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded there is none.

Timothy Westlake, who was nominated to serve as assistant secretary for mental health and substance use at the Department of Health and Human Services, was also advanced out of committee on the same en bloc vote.

It was not immediately clear when the officials would face a full Senate vote for their confirmation, but they are expected to be approved.

During her confirmation hearing, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy pressed Saphier to declare whether she believed there was a link between vaccines and autism. Saphier responded that she does “not believe childhood vaccines cause autism,” adding that “the MMR vaccine is our greatest tool for combating measles,” in response to a question by Cassidy over whether parents should give children that shot.

MMR stands for measles, mumps and rubella, and the president recently called for the shots to be spaced out, against the guidance of medical groups.

The surgeon general position carries limited policymaking power but serves as a loud megaphone as the nation’s top communicator to Americans on public health issues.

Cassidy, who led the inquiry into Saphier’s views on vaccines, ultimately voted in support of her nomination.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate HELP committee, said ahead of Saphier’s vote that he would vote down her nomination because in part Saphier “has questioned the need for the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, when the data science has been clear.”

“We need a surgeon general who will tell the truth about vaccines, not someone who misleads the public,” Sanders said. At her confirmation hearing, Saphier said the universal birth dose of hepatitis B was safe and effective.

Chris Klomp, who was nominated to serve as deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, was advanced out of the Senate Finance Committee last week on a 15 to 12 vote. He was questioned during the same hearing as Saphier about his duties associated with the role as the current chief counselor of the Department of Health and Human Services under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as well as about his vaccine stance.

In protesting Klomp’s nomination at the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden said Klomp “tried to create the impression that he will be the adult in the room on vaccines. Yet, as we sit here today, the vaccine chaos that we’ve come to expect from Robert Kennedy’s HHS continues.”

Hussein writes for the Associated Press.

Forget about its comparison to Martha’s Vineyard. “Widow’s Bay” can now call itself the next Emmy-winning comedy series.

At Monday’s Emmys ceremony, the first-year series beat out former winners “The Bear” and “Hacks”; returning nominees “Abbott Elementary,” “Nobody Wants This,” “Only Murders in the Building” and “Shrinking”; and fellow newcomer “Margo’s Got Money Troubles.”

The show took home a record-breaking 14 Emmys, the most ever for a comedy series. The wins include lead and supporting actor, supporting actress, directing and writing. The total overcame the milestone set by “The Studio” with its 13 wins last year.

Apple TV’s horror-comedy series about a fictional cursed island off the coast of New England and its mayor, played by Matthew Rhys, who is trying to save it from economic depression, became a word-of-mouth hit that’s inspired memes and fan cosplay. Creator and showrunner Katie Dippold began writing the series more than 10 years ago, inspired by her trips as a youth to the Jersey Shore and quaint New England seaside towns.

“This was such a great collaboration of the best wonderful weirdos and artists,” Dippold said while accepting the award. “We’d also like to thank the evil entity on the island that trusted us with its story.”

“That is exciting and terrifying,” she added backstage. “One thing I meant to thank in the speech, there’s so many people that spread the word early on, all the people online talking about it with reviews, people tweeting about it … we’re so grateful for that.”

“They were predominately our parents,” Rhys joked.

“And some burner accounts,” Dippold added.

The series was a late entry into the Emmy race, premiering at the end of April. Hiro Murai, who directed five of the series’ 10 episodes and is an executive producer, told The Times he thought of it as a “spooky summer show.” Murai won for directing for a comedy.

“The show takes place during the summer, and so much of what makes it scary is that it doesn’t look like it should be scary. It’s all sunlight,” he said. “The atmosphere is very summery.”

The series stars Rhys as overcompensating mayor Tom Loftis, with a supporting cast that includes veteran actors Stephen Root, Dale Dickey and Kate O’Flynn.

“Widow’s Bay” earned 19 nominations, including lead actor for Rhys and acting nominations for Root and O’Flynn. All three won in their categories.

Rhys, who also won for lead actor in a limited or anthology series for “The Beast in Me,” told The Times he hopes the hit series demonstrates to studios that it’s worth taking a risk and challenging its audience.

“Everyone’s more than ready for it and thirsty for it in a real way,” he said. “I really hope this does something in the Hollywood psyche, where they go, ‘Let’s put away the remakes and let’s just get after new challenging, original material.’ ”

The win gives Apple TV its second consecutive comedy series victory after “The Studio” won last year, and its fourth (“Ted Lasso” in 2021 and 2022) in the category in the last six years.

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and law professor Anita Faye Hill gave sworn testimony Friday so starkly irreconcilable that members of the Senate–and millions of other Americans–could not avoid a simple but devastatingly difficult question: Who is lying?

Thomas, eloquent in his injured defiance, “categorically denied” that he ever had asked Hill for a date or talked to her about sex. “I cannot imagine anything that I said or did to Anita Hill that could have been mistaken for sexual harassment,” he said.

An hour later, Hill delivered a prepared statement that was staggering in its specificity. Among other things, she said, Thomas “spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes.”

After such testimony, there seemed no way to finesse the allegations with a compromise. This could not be put down to differing interpretations of events or a regrettable misunderstanding. Thomas’ nomination could survive only if Hill’s seeming credibility did not.

As a result, members of the committee–almost all of them lawyers–quickly turned the hearing into the highly adversarial “trial” that they had vowed to avoid.

They bombarded Hill with the kinds of questions lawyers use to impeach, confuse and trip up witnesses in criminal trials. And, like the complaining witness in a rape trial, she became a defendant–called on to explain and justify her motives and her conduct in minute detail.

The Republicans, serving as the defense attorneys for Thomas, tried to shake Hill’s testimony by suggesting that she had “fantasies” about a more personal relationship with the fast-rising chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

They suggested that she had had such fantasies before, about at least one other associate.

Why did she wait so long to go public with her accusations? Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) asked. Why did she follow Thomas from the Department of Education to the EEOC? she was asked again and again in different ways?

Because she feared retaliation, Hill said in response to the first question. And because, as a special assistant to Thomas, she might not have been kept on by his successor at the Education Department, she replied to the second.

Did she not understand that, under civil service rules, she was protected? No, she said, and President Reagan at that time was trying to abolish the entire Education Department.

Why did she maintain a “cordial” relationship with Thomas after years of allegedly abusive treatment? Because she was afraid he would retaliate, she answered.

Back and forth, through the day and into the evening, the interrogation and the answers continued. The Democrats, apparently afraid of appearing partisan, only occasionally rose to Hill’s defense.

As an explosive face-to-face clash over who was telling the truth, the scene recalled the 1948 hearing in which Whittaker Chambers charged ex-State Department official Alger Hiss with being a closet communist.

But times have certainly changed. If a person’s communist sympathies were the most personal of secrets in the politics of the late 1940s, even sex was not entirely private in the politics of the 1990s.

Later Friday night, it was Thomas’ turn to answer questions, and he immediately went on the offensive, calling the hearing a “travesty” that “should never occur in America.” And he suggested that his attackers were motivated by racism. “From my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” he said.

Under solicitous questioning by Republican Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, Thomas repeated his unqualified denial of Hill’s allegations. And, although professing himself baffled as to her motives, he gently suggested that she may have been disgruntled at failing to win a promotion while on his staff, that she sometimes had temper tantrums and that an aide had once warned him she was his “enemy”–a suggestion that, he said, he had loyally dismissed out of hand.

Faced with such testimony, how could the senators, or the millions watching on television, decide who was telling the truth?

Congressional committees rarely face such directly contradictory testimony, but judges and jurors do in courtrooms every day. And criminal law experts say that jurors rely on three means of judging the truth: the demeanor of the witnesses, the detail of their testimony and their motivations for telling the truth.

Both Thomas and Hill spoke with the demeanor of truthful witnesses. Both described themselves as the real victims of the bitter controversy.

During his five days of testimony in mid-September, Thomas often seemed hesitant and uncertain as he discussed his legal views. But, in his opening statement Friday, he spoke with force and emotion as he angrily denied Hill’s allegations.

“I have been racking my brains and eating my insides out trying to think of what I could have said or done to Anita Hill to lead her to allege . . . that I talked with her about pornographic or X-rated films,” he declared.

Thomas noted that he had written his own statement without the help of political handlers or advisers and said that he was “shocked, surprised, hurt and enormously saddened” by Hill’s accusations. “I have not been the same person since. I am a victim of this process.”

Hill, a 35-year-old University of Oklahoma law professor, seemed to be nervous and reluctant as the hearing began. But, as she testified, her confidence seemed to grow. She spoke in the quiet but firm manner of a person forced to recount painful incidents in her past.

“It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration and a great number of sleepless nights that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my close friends,” she said.

Hill gave far more detail than Thomas. She spoke of lunches in government cafeterias and meetings in Thomas’ office. She said that he once spoke of a pornographic film actor named “Long Dong Silver” and that he talked of his own anatomy. The explicit details surprised committee Republicans, because her account of Thomas’ sexual comments went beyond what FBI agents reported after interviewing her.

She recounted in some detail her humiliation and dismay at Thomas’ behavior. In 1983, she said, she entered a hospital for an acute stomach pain that she blamed on stress over sexual harassment.

Thomas spoke more generally, explaining how he hired Hill and how they had worked together. In his opening statement, Thomas said that he would not enter into specific discussions of strictly “private” matters.

Who had a motivation for not telling the truth?

Committee Republicans tried with increasing force as the hearing wore on to suggest that Hill might have reason for concocting a “fantasy” about Thomas. Specter, a former Philadelphia prosecutor, tried with little visible success to suggest that she came forward with her 11th-hour accusations because she wanted to derail Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court.

“Are you a scorned woman?” asked Sen. Howard Heflin (D-Ala.) “Are you a zealot (sic) civil rights believer? Do you have a martyr complex? Are you interested in writing a book?”

Heflin’s questions, nominally critical, were a friendly ploy. They gave Hill an opportunity to attempt to convince her audience that she had no reason to lie and nothing to gain from making up such a story.

“I’m not given to fantasy,” Hill said. “I can only tell you what happened.”

Hill’s sexual harassment charges were especially powerful because her supervisor, Thomas, was then EEOC chairman. As such, he was the nation’s chief official with responsibility for enforcing federal laws against sex discrimination and sexual harassment.

By nightfall, Heflin, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, summed up the day’s proceedings–and how the contradictions might be resolved.

“I, and I suppose every member of this committee, have to come down to the ultimate question of who’s telling the truth,” Heflin said.

“My experience as a lawyer, a judge, is that you listen to all the testimony and then you try to determine the motivation for the one that is not telling the truth.”

The ex-Oklahoma state trooper’s nomination had stalled in the Senate as ICE faced growing scrutiny over its operations.

The White House has withdrawn the nomination of former Oklahoma state trooper Lance Schroyer to lead United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), without giving a reason for the decision.

The withdrawal was announced on Thursday. Schroyer, a senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, was nominated by President Donald Trump in June but had yet to receive a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who chairs the committee, had refused to hold a hearing until the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provided information he had requested about civilian deaths during ICE enforcement operations.

“I don’t have a concern with who the nominee was. I had asked them to give me an update on the internal investigation into civilian deaths,” Paul told The Associated Press news agency.

Paul said he had intended to hold a hearing on Schroyer’s nomination but learned that it had been withdrawn when the White House made the decision public.

ICE remains under scrutiny

Schroyer had little experience in immigration and had not previously worked at ICE or led a major law enforcement agency. Two US officials told the Reuters news agency when he was nominated that he had been a surprise choice for the position.

When announcing Schroyer’s nomination in June, Trump said on Truth Social that he had “firsthand experience getting Illegal Aliens OFF our streets” and called on the Senate to confirm him “IMMEDIATELY”.

The withdrawal comes as ICE remains under scrutiny over its enforcement operations as the Trump administration carries out its immigration crackdown.

Critics have raised questions about how the agency has recruited and trained officers as it rapidly expanded its workforce. Federal immigration officers have also shot and killed multiple people during enforcement operations, including two US citizens in Minneapolis earlier this year.

ICE arrests have continued to increase, reaching nearly 51,000 in August, the highest monthly total of Trump’s second administration.

ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed director since 2017. David Venturella is serving as acting director after Todd Lyons resigned earlier this year.

The White House has not indicated when it might announce another nominee to lead the agency.

WASHINGTON — The White House said Thursday that it was withdrawing its nomination of Lance Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper, to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ensuring that an agency at the forefront of President Trump’s domestic agenda will remain without a Senate-confirmed leader for at least a while longer.

Schroyer, who has little experience in immigration, is close to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma.

The White House offered no comment in a brief statement.

The latest setback comes as the agency remains under withering scrutiny over its handling of enforcement operations. Critics have question how ICE has recruited and trained officers as it raced to hire thousands to carry out Trump’s promise of mass deportations. Officers have shot and killed multiple people, including two American citizens in Minneapolis this year.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, had refused to hold a hearing on the nominee until Homeland Security provided him with information he had been seeking about civilian deaths during ICE enforcement operations.

“I don’t have a concern with who the nominee was. I had asked them to give me an update on the internal investigation into civilian deaths,” Paul told The Associated Press. “And I’m still waiting.”

When Mullin took over the department in March, he pledged a lower-profile approach to immigration enforcement, pulling back on the aggressive, tumultuous crackdown on the streets of large cities that sparked widespread public condemnation.

Arrests have continued to accelerate, reaching nearly 51,000 in August, the highest single monthly arrest total during the second Trump administration.

Paul said he intended to hold a hearing on Schroyer’s nomination, but it never came to that. He heard about the nomination being withdrawn only when the White House made it public Thursday.

ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed leader since the Obama administration. David Venturella, a former executive at a private prison operator, returned to the agency as acting director this year after Todd Lyons resigned.

When Trump nominated Schroyer in June, Trump said on his Truth Social platform that his pick was “a PATRIOT with real operational experience” and a “proven leader with DECADES of experience locking up the worst of the worst.”

The administration did not indicate when it might announce another pick for the position.