Oct. 23 (UPI) — The University of Virginia has entered into an agreement with the Justice Department to resolve federal investigations, amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on left-leaning ideology at institutions of higher learning.
Both the University of Virginia and the Justice Department confirmed on Wednesday that an agreement had been reached. Federal prosecutors said their probes of the school’s admissions policies and civil rights concerns will be paused.
Under the terms of the deal, the University of Virginia agrees to implement Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination, which the Trump administration released in late July, tying federal funding with its interpretation of civil rights laws that restrict diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs.
The school also agrees to provide federal prosecutors with relevant information and data on a quarterly basis through 2028, though it will pay no monetary penalty.
“Importantly, it preserves the academic freedom of our faculty, students and staff,” University of Virginia interim President Paul Mahoney said in a letter Wednesday addressed to the school’s community.
“We will be treated no less favorably than any other university in terms of federal research grants and funding. The agreement does not involve external monitoring. Instead, the University will update the Department of Justice quarterly on its efforts to ensure compliance with federal law.”
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has used his executive powers to target dozens of universities, in particular so-called elite institutions, with executive orders, lawsuits, reallocations of resources and threats over a range of allegations, from anti-Semitism to the adoption of DEI policies.
Critics have accused Trump of coercing the schools under threat to adopt his far-right policies.
The University of Virginia is one of the seven schools since Oct. 1 that rejected signing Trump’s 10-part Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The Trump administration invited nine schools to sign the compact and receive priority access to federal funds in exchange for adopting government-mandated reforms, including a pledge to prohibit transgender women from using women’s changing rooms.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., accused the University of Virginia of relenting to “Trump’s bullying.”
“It’s not just wrong — it’s counterproductive, feeds the beast and just encourages more mafia-like blackmail from this lawless administration,” he said on X.
Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Va., said it was a “surrender” by the University of Virginia.
“And represents a huge expansion of federal power that Republicans have would have never tolerated in the past — we have the right to run our universities,” he said on X.
1 of 3 | Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, speaks with members of the press outside the House chamber ahead of the last votes before August recess at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., in July. Jordan on Tuesday demanded that former Special Counsel Jack Smith testify about his criminal probes of President Donald Trump. File Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI | License Photo
Oct. 14 (UPI) — House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan on Tuesday demanded that former Special Counsel Jack Smith testify about his criminal probes of President Donald Trump that were ultimately dropped after the 2024 election.
Jordan, a Trump loyalist, made the demands in a letter to Smith, who had been appointed by the Biden-era Justice Department to oversee sprawling investigations into allegations Trump mishandled classified documents and tried to overturn the 2020 election.
The letter follows recent revelations that Smith’s team had obtained the cell phone data of nine Republican members of Congress, showing who they called in the days leading up to and immediately after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Trump and his allies have accused Smith of leading politicized investigations into the president meant to damage him politically as he was campaigning to return to the White House in 2024.
“As the Committee continues its oversight, your testimony is necessary to understand the full extent to which the Biden-Harris Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement,” Jordan wrote in his letter, accusing Smith of prosecutorial overreach and manipulating evidence.
Before resigning from his position in January just as Trump was about to be sworn into his second term, Smith issued a report to Congress stating that Trump would have been convicted of trying to overturn the 2020 election had he not been elected president in 2024. The Justice Department has a long-standing policy of not indicting sitting presidents.
Smith alleged that Trump had mounted a pressure campaign on state officials to throw out legitimate vote results in a scheme to have Trump certified as the winner of the 2020 election. As part of the effort, Trump directed a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress was certifying the election results, Smith alleged.
Jordan wrote that his committee has already deposed several people who worked on Smith’s team and obtained FBI documents showing the surveillance of U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, who later had his cell phone seized. However, Jordan wrote that former Senior Assistant Special Counsel Thomas Windom refused to answer key questions from the committee. Jordan also demanded that Smith turn over documents.
Smith currently does not face any charges.
After leaving his position, the Office of Special Counsel, which is designed to operate with some independence from the Justice Department, began investigating Smith in August.
WASHINGTON — Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi struck a defiant tone Tuesday during a Senate hearing where she dodged a series of questions about brewing scandals that have dogged her agency.
In many instances, Bondi’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee devolved into personal attacks against Democrats, who expressed dismay at their inability to get her to answer their inquiries.
“This is supposed to be an oversight hearing in which members of Congress can get serious answers to serious questions about the cover-up of corruption about the prosecution of the president’s enemies,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said toward the end of the nearly five-hour hearing. “When will it be that the members of this committee on a bipartisan basis demand answers to those questions?”
It marked a continuation of what has become a hallmark of not just Bondi, but most of Trump’s top officials. When pressed on potential scandals that the president has taken great pains to publicly avoid, they almost universally turn to one tactic: ignore and attack the questioner.
That strategy was shown in an exchange between Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who wanted to know who decided to close an investigation into Trump border advisor Tom Homan. Homan reportedly accepted $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents after indicating he could get them government contracts. Bondi declined to say and shifted the focus to Padilla.
“I wish that you loved your state of California as much as you hate President Trump,” Bondi said. “We’d be in really good shape then because violent crime in California is currently 35% higher than the national average.”
In between partisan attacks, the congressional hearing allowed Bondi to boast about her eight months in office. She said her focus has been on combating illegal immigration, violent crime and restoring public trust in the Justice Department, which she said Biden-era officials weaponized against Trump.
“They wanted to take President Trump off the playing field,” she said about the effort to indict Trump. “This is the kind of conduct that shatters the American people’s faith in our law enforcement system. We will work to earn that back every single day. We are returning to our core mission of fighting real crime.”
She defended the administration’s deployment of federal troops to Washington, D.C., and Chicago, where she said troops had been sent on Tuesday. Bondi declined to say whether the White House consulted her on the deployment of troops to American cities but said the effort is meant to “protect” citizens from violent crime.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked about the legal justification for the military shooting vessels crossing the Carribbean Sea off Venezuela. The administration has said the boats are carrying drugs, but Coons told Bondi that “Congress has never authorized such a use of military force.”
“It’s unclear to me how the administration has concluded that the strikes are legal,” Coons said.
Bondi told Coons she would not discuss the legal advice her department has given to the president on the matter but said Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “is a narcoterrorist,” and that “drugs coming from Venezuela are killing our children at record levels.”
Coons said he was “gravely concerned” that she was not leading a department that is making decisions that are in “keeping with the core values of the Constitution.” As another example, he pointed to Trump urging her to prosecute his political adversaries, such as Comey.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) the top Democrat on the committee, raised a similar concern at the beginning of the hearing, saying Bondi has “systematically weaponized our nation’s leading law enforcement agency to protect President Trump and his allies.”
“In eight short months, you have fundamentally transformed the Justice Department and left an enormous stain on American history,” Durbin said. “It will take decades to recover.”
Boluarte, Peru’s first female president, has faced investigations into protest-related deaths and alleged illicit enrichment.
The Constitutional Court of Peru has paused investigations into Dina Boluarte until her term ends in 2026, citing her position as the country’s sitting president.
On Tuesday, the court suspended probes led by the public prosecutor’s office that looked into alleged misconduct under Boluarte.
“The suspended investigations will continue after the end of the presidential term,” the ruling explained.
One of the most significant probes had to do with Boluarte’s response to the protests that erupted in Peru in December 2022, after the embattled president at the time, Pedro Castillo, attempted to dissolve Congress.
Instead, Castillo was impeached, removed from office and imprisoned, with critics calling his actions an attempted coup d’etat.
His removal, in turn, prompted months of intense public backlash: Thousands of protesters blocked roads and led marches in support of the left-wing leader.
Boluarte, who took over the presidency, declared a state of emergency in response, and the subsequent clashes between the police and protesters killed more than 60 people and left hundreds injured.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found that, in certain parts of the country, “the disproportionate, indiscriminate, and lethal use of force was a major element of the State response to the protests”.
It noted that “a significant number of victims were not even involved in the protests”.
In January 2023, Attorney General Patricia Benavides launched a probe into the actions of Boluarte and her ministers. By November of that year, Benavides had filed a constitutional complaint, accusing Boluarte of causing death and injury to protesters.
The public prosecutor’s office later set aside part of the investigation, which delved into whether Boluarte’s actions amounted to “genocide”.
Boluarte has denied any wrongdoing and instead called the protest probe a distraction from the attorney general’s own public scandals.
But Boluarte has continued to face probes into other aspects of her presidency.
Police in 2024 raided her home and the presidential palace as part of the “Rolex case”, an investigation prompted by media reports that Boluarte owned multiple luxury watches and high-end jewellery that were beyond her means to purchase. Critics have accused her of seeking illicit enrichment.
Another investigation looked into her absence from office in 2023, when Boluarte said she had to undergo a “necessary and essential” medical procedure on her nose — though critics have said it was a cosmetic procedure.
Her absence, they argue, was therefore a dereliction of duty, done without notifying Congress. In that case, too, Boluarte has denied the charges.
Peru has weathered much instability in its government: Boluarte is the sixth president in seven years, and virtually all of Peru’s presidents have faced criminal investigations, if not convictions, in the last quarter century.
Boluarte, however, had petitioned the Constitutional Court to stop the investigations until her term is over.
She is set to exit her office on July 28, 2026, after calling for a new general election in March. She has faced public pressure to resign since taking over for Castillo in December 2022.
The administration of United States President Donald Trump has launched a new investigation against Harvard University, this time targeted at an exchange programme that allows foreign scholars to visit the elite school.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement on Wednesday saying the probe was necessary to ensure US security — but the investigation is likely to be seen by critics as the latest attempt to bully the school into compliance with President Donald Trump’s policies.
“The American people have the right to expect their universities to uphold national security, comply with the law, and provide safe environments for all students,” Rubio wrote in the statement.
“The investigation will ensure that State Department programs do not run contrary to our nation’s interests.”
At stake is Harvard’s exchange visitor programme, which allows professors, students and researchers to come to the US on a temporary basis.
Participating scholars receive a J-1 visa, which allows them to participate in cultural and academic exchange programmes on the basis that they are coming to the US not as immigrants but as visitors.
But Harvard’s ability to host such a programme is contingent on the State Department’s approval. Rubio suggested that the school’s “continued eligibility as a sponsor” would hang in the balance of Wednesday’s investigation.
“To maintain their privilege to sponsor exchange visitors, sponsors must comply with all regulations, including conducting their programs in a manner that does not undermine the foreign policy objectives or compromise the national security interests of the United States,” Rubio wrote.
The group Crimson Courage led a show of support for Harvard outside the federal courthouse in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 21 [Brian Snyder/Reuters]
Questions of national security
Under President Trump’s second term, the US has repeatedly cited questions of national security and foreign policy in its attempts to expel foreign students, particularly those involved in pro-Palestinian and antiwar movements.
Rubio himself has drawn on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 — a relatively obscure Cold War-era law — in his efforts to deport student protest leaders like Mahmoud Khalil.
The law allows the secretary of state to expel foreign nationals “whose presence or activities” could pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.
The government’s use of such laws, however, is currently being challenged in court. Critics argue they violate the constitutional right to free speech and protest.
It was President Trump’s opposition to the pro-Palestinian protests that led him to engage in a high-profile confrontation with Harvard, the country’s oldest university and a member of the much-vaunted Ivy League.
Schools like Harvard in Massachusetts and Columbia University in New York were considered the epicentre of the protest movement. At Columbia, for instance, students erected a tent encampment that inspired similar demonstrations across the world.
The schools’ crackdowns on those protests, however, were also emulated at other campuses. Columbia, for instance, called in police to clear pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and other schools took similar action, leading to more than 3,000 campus arrests across the country last year.
Critics of the protests, including President Trump, have called the demonstrations anti-Semitic and warned they create an unsafe learning environment for Jewish students.
Protest leaders, however, point out that most of the demonstrations were peaceful and have forcefully rejected anti-Jewish hate. Rather, they argue their protests are about shining a light on the abuses Israel has perpetrated in Gaza — and the crackdowns are aimed at stamping out views that run contrary to the US’s close relationship with Israel.
David Prum, parodying President Donald Trump, demonstrates against attempts to strip Harvard of its federal funding [Brian Snyder/Reuters]
Pressure on schools
Upon taking office in January, however, Trump pledged to take “forceful and unprecedented steps” to root out alleged anti-Semitism on campus.
In early March, he began his broadside on Ivy League campuses like Columbia and Harvard. He began by stripping Columbia of $400m in federal contracts and grants and then by requesting compliance with a list of demands, including disciplinary reform and external oversight for certain academic departments.
By March 22, Columbia had agreed to make concessions.
But Trump encountered greater resistance at Harvard University. On April 11, the Trump administration likewise issued a list of demands that would have required Harvard to commit to “structural and personnel changes” to foster “viewpoint diversity”, eliminate its diversity programmes and agree to external audits.
It refused. Instead, Harvard President Alan Garber said such requests would violate Harvard’s rights as a private institution committed to academic freedom.
Since then, the Trump administration has stripped Harvard of billions of dollars in federal contracts, research funding and grants. A federal court in Boston began hearing a legal challenge against that decision this week.
A multipronged attack
But the Trump administration has also explored other avenues to pressure Harvard into compliance.
Trump has threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status — though critics warn it would be illegal to do so — and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blocked Harvard from accessing the Student and Exchange Visitor Programme (SEVP), a system that schools are required to use to enrol international students.
Foreign students make up about a quarter of Harvard’s student body. Losing access to the SEVP system effectively meant those students were no longer able to attend the school.
Harvard challenged the Trump administration’s ban on its foreign students in court and received a preliminary injunction that allows its international students to remain while the case plays out.
But other hurdles have since emerged. Earlier this month, for instance, the Trump administration accused Harvard of civil rights violations and called for a review of its accreditation, the industry-wide quality standard that gives university diplomas their value.
Meanwhile, news outlets have reported that officials from the Trump administration and Harvard continue to negotiate over whether a deal can be struck to defuse the ongoing tensions.
July 11 (UPI) — The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Minnesota’s hiring practices, the third legal or administrative action the Trump administration has taken against the Democratic-led state in just over two weeks.
The Justice Department informed Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison of the investigation into the state’s hiring practices in a letter dated Thursday.
“Our investigation is based on information that Minnesota may be engaged in certain employment practices that discriminate against employees, job applicants and training program participants based on race and sex in violation of Title VII,” Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.
“Specifically, we have reason to believe the Minnesota Department of Human Services is engaging in unlawful action through, among other things, the adoption and forthcoming implementation of its ‘hiring justification’ policy.”
Early this month, the Minnesota Department of Human Services announced a new hiring policy set to take effect Aug. 12. It directs hiring supervisors to “provide a hiring justification when seeking to hire a non-underrepresented candidate when hiring for a vacancy in a job category with underrepresentation.”
The purpose of the directive is to ensure the department meets its affirmative action responsibilities, comply with state laws and increase the diversity of its workforce.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has sought to roll back so-called progressive practices, including diversity, equity and inclusion policies. In an executive order issued on his second day in office titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, he specifically ordered the federal government to cease demanding that contractors adopt affirmative action policies, describing it as illegal discrimination.
The Justice Department on Thursday described the Minnesota Department of Human Services’ new policy as part of a broader effort by the state to engage in race- and sex-based employment practices.
“Minnesotans deserve to have their state government employees hired based on merit, not based on illegal DEI,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been a critic of Trump and ran against his ticket as the vice presidential candidate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Since then, the two have clashed.
After a man assassinated a state lawmaker and wounded another in Minnesota in mid-June, Trump declined to call Walz.
“I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out — I’m not calling him. Why would I call? I could call him and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a mess. So, I could be nice and call him, but why waste my time?” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
Late last month, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit challenging Minnesota laws that provide some undocumented immigrants with higher-education tuition benefits not offered to all U.S. citizens.
The next day, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services opened a civil rights investigation into the Minnesota Department of Education over a transgender teenager competing on a girls’ softball team.
Roman Starovoit was found dead near his car in the Moscow region hours after President Vladimir Putin dismissed him.
Russia’s top criminal investigation agency is probing the death of Roman Starovoit, a former transport minister whose body was found with a gunshot wound near his car, hours after President Vladimir Putin dismissed him from his post.
Authorities on Monday said the 53-year-old politician’s body was discovered near a Tesla vehicle abandoned near a park in the Moscow region, with a pistol, registered in Starovoit’s name, located nearby.
The Investigative Committee has opened a case to determine the full circumstances of his death, suggesting it could be suicide. Russian media, citing law enforcement sources, said the gunshot appeared to be self-inflicted.
However, the timing of the death has prompted speculation.
Putin issued a decree earlier on Monday, removing Starovoit as transport minister, a role he had held for just more than a year. No explanation was provided.
Political commentators quickly linked the decision to a long-running corruption investigation in the Kursk region, where Starovoit previously served as governor.
The probe centres on whether 19.4 billion roubles ($246m) allocated in 2022 to bolster border defences in Kursk were embezzled.
The funds were meant to reinforce Russia’s frontier with Ukraine, but Ukrainian forces launched a cross-border assault into the region three months into Starovoit’s ministerial term – the largest such incursion since World War II.
In April, his successor and former deputy in Kursk, Alexei Smirnov, was charged with embezzling defence funds. Several Russian outlets reported on Monday that Smirnov, who denies wrongdoing, had told investigators Starovoit was also involved in the alleged fraud.
The incident casts a shadow over Russia’s transport sector, already grappling with wartime pressures.
Western sanctions have left the aviation industry struggling for spare parts, while soaring interest rates have pushed Russian Railways – the country’s largest employer – into financial strain.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s drone attacks continue to disrupt domestic air traffic, forcing temporary airport closures and leading to logistical uncertainty.
Following Starovoit’s dismissal, the Kremlin announced that Andrei Nikitin, former governor of the Novgorod region, had been appointed as acting transport minister. Photographs released by state media showed him shaking hands with Putin.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Putin believed Nikitin had the necessary experience to steer the ministry through current challenges. At his meeting with the president, Nikitin pledged to modernise the sector by boosting digital infrastructure to improve cargo flows and cross-border trade.
