request

A federal judge has declined to halt President Trump’s executive order creating a federal voter list and limiting mail voting, clearing the way for potential sweeping changes in how American elections are run shortly before this year’s midterm elections.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee in Washington, late Wednesday rejected the request by Democrats and civil rights groups that had argued Trump’s order would likely be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. Nichols agreed with the Republican Trump administration’s contention that it was too early to block the order because it has yet to be implemented.

Nichols’ ruling leaves the door open for further challenges when the Trump administration moves to implement the president’s directive. A separate lawsuit seeking to block the executive order is underway in Boston. No matter how rapidly the administration acts, no voting changes are expected during primary elections, which continue into next month.

“The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws,” Nichols wrote. “Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur. Until then, however, Plaintiffs cannot show that preliminary injunctive relief is warranted.”

The Trump administration has yet to formally issue lists of eligible voters, and those who filed the initial request for a temporary halt said they’d be back if the administration moves in that direction.

“We are ready to resume the fight if and when the administration takes those next steps,” said Juan Proaño, chief executive officer of the League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the organizations that sought the stay from Nichols.

Trump issued the order in March after a bill he supported to overhaul voting stalled in Congress. The order would have had the federal government create a list of eligible voters and then directed the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to those on the list. Election officials argued it was ripe for abuse and could cause chaos, and the postal union has objected to the idea of mail carriers policing ballots.

Since his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump has groundlessly claimed mail voting is rife with fraud and has launched a federal investigation into that year’s vote, even though repeated audits and investigations, including ones run by Republicans, found it was free of widespread fraud. Trump also has said he wants to “take over” election administration in Democratic areas.

Democrats and civil rights groups argued it was urgent that Nichols issue a restraining order in the midst of primary season and with states already gearing up for the fall midterm elections.

This was Trump’s second executive order seeking to overhaul elections and voting. His initial election executive order, issued just months after he took office in his second term, has been blocked by multiplefederal judges. That order sought to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, among other changes.

Riccardi writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether E. Jean Carroll, the longtime advice columnist who has said Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in a New York department store 30 years ago, lied during the course of civil litigation against the Republican president, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The person who confirmed the existence of the investigation was not authorized to publicly discuss an ongoing inquiry and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The perjury investigation is being led by the federal prosecutors’ office in Chicago, and acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche has had no involvement because of his prior work as Trump’s personal attorney, the person said.

Lawyers for Carroll did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press on Thursday.

It’s the latest in a series of investigations the Trump administration Justice Department has opened into perceived adversaries of the president. The actions, including securing an indictment last month against former FBI Director James Comey, have raised alarm from Democrats and former officials that an institution meant to make prosecutorial decisions independent of the White House is being weaponized.

Carroll has said a flirtatious, chance encounter with Trump in 1996 at Bergdorf Goodman’s Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan ended violently. She said Trump slammed her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself on her. Trump has called the allegations a “made-up scam,” and he has attacked her motivations, saying they were politically driven or arose from a desire to promote her memoir.

A jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, awarding her $5 million. The following year, another jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in a defamation case related to Trump’s social media attacks on her.

The Justice Department is scrutinizing a statement Carroll made in the course of the civil litigation that no one else was paying her legal fees. It later became public that a Chicago-based organization backed by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, had helped fund Carroll’s case. Trump’s lawyers in the civil case accused Carroll of concealing that information, which they said called into question whether the case was politically motivated.

A court entry earlier this month said Trump won’t have to pay the award until the U.S. Supreme Court gets a chance to review the case or reject an appeal. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to a request by one of Trump’s lawyers that it let the president delay the payment to Carroll, though it required that he post a $7.4 million bond to cover any additional interest costs, a request Carroll’s attorney had made.

The Carroll investigation was first reported by CNN.

Richer and Tucker write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration wants all current and future federal employees to sign nondisclosure agreements, part of a continuing crackdown on leaks to the media.

The notice in the Federal Register from the Office of Personnel Management posted Tuesday asked for comment on a draft NDA to be used by federal agencies for “both new and existing employees.”

“The form is intended to document Federal employees’ acknowledgment of, and agreement to comply with, current legal obligations to safeguard non-public, confidential, or proprietary information, created or obtained through their official duties, while expressly preserving the right to make disclosures authorized by law,” the notice said.

The Office of Personnel Management noted “several recent instances” where internal agency communications related to rulemaking and policy development were disclosed without authorization. It also discussed specific instances in which federal employees at the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security disclosed information without authorization about planned immigration enforcement actions.

In one case, the New York Times and Washington Post received unauthorized information on the U.S. raid on Venezuela in January and delayed “publishing what they knew to avoid endangering U.S. troops,” the request for comment said.

Representatives for the two newspapers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ferreting out leaks that the administration deems harmful to its messaging has been a priority across multiple agencies since President Trump returned to the White House. As part of that crackdown, the FBI in January seized the electronic devices of a Washington Post reporter, a move that alarmed media organizations and advocates of press freedom.

One other notable incident occurred last year when dozens of reporters turned in their access badges at the Pentagon, rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.

The American Federation of Government Employees did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Iran is moving its World Cup training base from Tucson, Ariz., to Tijuana, the president of the country’s soccer federation said Saturday, removing one of the final hurdles to its participation in this summer’s tournament.

Iran is scheduled to open World Cup play at SoFi Stadium, facing New Zealand on June 15. It will play Belgium in Inglewood six days later before finishing the group stage against Egypt in Seattle. But there had been questions over the Iranian team’s security in the U.S. after American and Israeli attacks on the country began nearly four months ago.

This World Cup will be the first in which a qualifying team will play in a host country with which it was at war. In March, shortly after the war began, Iranian officials began to question whether they should travel to the U.S. for the tournament — doubts that increased after President Trump posted on social media to say he did not believe it was appropriate for Iran to come “for their own life and safety.”

Because the World Cup is being shared with Mexico and Canada, Iran requested permission to move its base across the border, a request Mehdi Taj, president of the Iran Football Federation, said Saturday had been granted.

FIFA, the World Cup organizer, did not immediately confirm to move.

“All team base camps for the countries participating in the World Cup must be approved [by] FIFA,” Taj said in his statement obtained by the Associated Press. “Fortunately, following the requests we submitted and the meetings we held with FIFA and World Cup officials in Istanbul, as well as the webinar meeting we had yesterday in Tehran with the respected FIFA secretary general, our request to change the team’s base from the United States to Mexico was approved.”

Iran’s federation said moving the base camp will resolve potential visa issues since the team will enter the U.S. through Mexico. Taj that the team “may even be able to travel to and from Mexico using Iran Air flights.”

Tijuana is about 50 minutes by air from LAX, about 55 minutes quicker than a flight from Tucson. Iranians have been banned by the U.S. government from receiving visas to enter the U.S., although exceptions are to be made for athletes, coaches, and support personnel involved in the World Cup.

WASHINGTON — Republican senators are considering dropping a proposal for $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Trump’s ballroom after it has failed to win enough party support on Capitol Hill.

Pressured by the White House, Republicans have tried to add the money to a roughly $70-billion bill to restore funding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. But the security proposal has met with backlash from some GOP lawmakers who are questioning the cost and the lack of detail from the White House and U.S. Secret Service about how the taxpayer dollars would be used.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Wednesday that the bill was “back to square one” without the security money because “the votes are not there.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said the effort to add the security package to the bill was a “bad idea” and he does not think there is enough backing to pass it, even if it were reduced.

The text of the bill has not yet been released. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) acknowledged “ongoing vote issues” as leaders try to measure Republican support, as well as “ongoing parliamentarian issues” as they try to figure out what will be allowed in the bill under the chamber’s rules.

The wrangling comes as Democrats have criticized Republicans for trying to fund Trump’s ballroom when voters are concerned about basic affordability issues — and as some GOP lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated with Trump. Several have spoken out against the administration’s $1.8-billion settlement fund designed to compensate Trump’s allies, and many were upset by the president’s endorsement Tuesday of Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton in the party primary runoff next week against Sen. John Cornyn.

“There’s always a consequence with taking on United States senators,” Thune said. Trump “obviously has his favorites and people he wants to endorse and that’s his prerogative. But what we have to deal with up here is moving the agenda, and obviously that can become slightly more complicated.”

Republican opposition blocks Secret Service request

Under the Secret Service request, about $220 million would pay for security improvements related to the ballroom. The rest would go for a new screening center for visitors, training and other security measures.

Tillis said the bill should not have included the other security improvements “because it’s just giving everybody the ‘billion-dollar ballroom.’”

“They need to explain to me why we need this,” Tillis said, noting that Trump had originally said private money would cover the project.

Several other Republicans in the House and Senate have questioned the request, and senators left a briefing with the director of the Secret Service last week saying they needed a lot more information.

People “can’t afford groceries and gasoline and healthcare, and we’re going to do a billion dollars for a ballroom?” asked Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who lost reelection in the GOP primary on Saturday after Trump endorsed one of his opponents.

Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) said he is supportive of the security money and thinks it is necessary to protect the president. But he acknowledged that the optics are not very good for Republicans, and that they have not communicated about it well.

“We’ve got people out there who are worried about how in the world they’re going to have enough gas to get home,” Justice said.

Tensions rise between Senate and White House

As Republicans challenged parts of his agenda, Trump unloaded on the Senate in a social media post.

He urged Republicans to fire the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, who said over the weekend that parts of the $1-billion security proposal cannot remain in the ICE and Border Patrol bill. Trump renewed his long-standing calls for the Senate to pass the SAVE Act, a Republican bill that would require all voters to prove U.S. citizenship, and to end the Senate filibuster.

“Republicans play a very soft game compared to the Dumocrats,” he wrote. “It is their single biggest disadvantage in politics.”

Trump said Democrats would eliminate the filibuster “on the First Day” if they ever get full power in Washington again and that Republicans need to “get smart and tough” or “you’ll all be looking for a job much sooner than you thought possible!”

Republicans have been loyal to Trump on most issues, but they have resisted his repeated calls — even in his first term — to kill the filibuster, which triggers a 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

Hanging over the growing GOP rift is Trump’s surprise endorsement of Paxton. That intervention has Republican senators privately fuming that it could cost them their majority in November as they view the incumbent, Cornyn, as the better candidate in the November general election.

Democrats test Republicans on settlement fund

As Republicans move forward on the immigration enforcement legislation, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Democrats plan to force a vote on Trump’s proposed settlement fund.

Democrats have an opening because Republicans are trying to pass the immigration enforcement bill through a complicated budget process that requires a long series of amendment votes. Democrats are considering multiple amendments potentially to block that new fund outright or to ban any payments to Trump supporters who harmed law enforcement officers in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Those amendments, along with others, could pass as a growing number of Republicans speak out against the fund and other parts of Trump’s agenda.

Thune said he was “not a big fan” of the new fund, which the administration announced as a part of a settlement that resolves the president’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Cassidy called it a “slush fund” and said “you can’t just make up things.”

Tillis said he thinks it is a “real risk” that some of the rioters charged — and later pardoned by Trump — in the Jan. 6 attack could get compensation through the fund. He said that would be “absurd.”

On Wednesday, two police officers who helped defend the Capitol in the 2021 assault sued to block the payouts. Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, a personal attorney for Trump before joining the Department of Justice in Trump’s second term, would not rule out the possibility that rioters who assaulted police on Jan. 6 would be eligible for compensation when he testified in a Senate hearing this week.

Jalonick, Freking and Cappelletti write for the Associated Press.

Shakira’s long tax-fraud nightmare has ended with the government of Spain on the hook to refund nearly $70 million to the Colombian-born singer after prosecutors failed to prove she spent enough time in that country to owe it a chunk of her earnings.

Since 2018, the singer has been accused of defrauding the Spanish government in three cases, for the tax years 2011, 2012-2014 and 2018. Over the years, deals were offered, rejected and accepted; charges were dropped, other charges were filed; and an eight-year prison sentence was threatened.

Shakira maintained her innocence, saying in 2022 that “Spanish tax authorities saw that I was dating a Spanish citizen and started to salivate,” referring to her relationship with Barcelona-born footballer Gerard Piqué, the father of their sons Milan and Sasha. Piqué and the singer, who met in 2010 when she did “Waka Waka,” the official song of that year’s FIFA World Cup, separated in 2022.

A representative for the singer, whose full name is Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll, did not respond immediately to The Times’ request for comment on the court decision.

However, despite there being no fraud, Shakira told People on Monday in a statement that “for nearly a decade, I was treated as guilty. Every step of the process was leaked, distorted, and amplified, using my name and public image to send a threatening message to the rest of the taxpayers.”

She added, “Today, that narrative crumbles, and it does so with the full force of a court ruling.”

Everything revolved around how many days Shakira spent in Spain in the years in question. With her legal residence in the Bahamas before she declared Spain her fiscal home in 2014, she had to spend more than half the year outside of her beau’s home country to avoid paying taxes there.

“They knew I wasn’t in Spain the required time, that Spain wasn’t my place of work or my source of income, but they still came after me, with their eyes on the prize,” Shakira told Elle in 2022, adding that she was confident that justice would prevail in her favor at trial. “I have enough proof.”

The amount the Spanish government owes her includes fines and interest in addition to the money she handed over, despite having no legal obligation to pay it.

In other Shakira news, she and Burna Boy just released the 2026 FIFA World Cup song, titled “Dai Dai.”

WASHINGTON — Shouting over the banging and clanging sounds from heavy construction equipment, President Trump on Tuesday gave a group of reporters a closer look at the construction for the White House ballroom he’s building on the site of the former East Wing to mount a defense for the project that has hit a speed bump in Congress.

The administration has asked for $1 billion from taxpayers for security additions on the White House campus, including for the ballroom. But the Senate parliamentarian ruled the proposal could not be included in a bill to fund immigrant enforcement agencies for three years, and several Republican lawmakers have balked at the price tag in an election year where voters are grappling with gasoline, grocery and other prices spurred to new heights by the Iran war and the disruption in oil supplies.

So Trump, ever the pitchman, surprised White House reporters by bringing them to a platform overlooking the construction site on a hot and breezy morning as workers in hard hats and fluorescent yellow vests milled about below.

Easels were set up to display renderings of the ballroom building and at least one of them blew off in the wind. “Give that to me, I’ll hold it,” Trump told an assistant.

“There will never be another building like this built, that I can tell you,” Trump told reporters.

He highlighted the security aspects of the building, notably its “dead flat” roof made of “very strong steel” and said it is “drone-proof” because “if a drone hits it, it bounces off, it won’t have any impact — but it’s also meant as a drone port, so it protects all of Washington, the roof of the building.”

He said the military will “stay on it” to keep watch over the city.

There’s no air conditioning or other equipment on the roof for safety reasons, Trump said, explaining that all duct work and equipment like it was hidden within the walls of the complex, which will serve as a “shield” for a military hospital, research facilities, offices for the first lady and her staff, and a full-service kitchen — in addition to a ballroom big enough for 1,000 people.

He said the ballroom building goes down six stories underground and is really “complex” because “everything is intertwined.”

“The roof goes with the ground floor, the ground floor goes with the roof. The roof also goes down into the basement,” the president said. “This is one well-knit building. One thing doesn’t work without the other.”

Trump says the ballroom is a ‘gift’ to the country

He reiterated that the $400-million ballroom cost will be covered by donors, including him, and that the work is being done “in strict coordination” with the military and U.S. Secret Service.

“This is not going to be paid for by the taxpayer,” Trump said. “This is a gift to the United States of America.”

But it’s somewhat of an unwanted present as polling shows most Americans oppose the ballroom, which is embroiled in litigation in federal court. A Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted in April found that a majority, 56%, of U.S. adults oppose Trump’s decision to tear down the East Wing to make way for the ballroom, while only 28% are in support.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to halt construction until Congress approves plans for the building.

Trump insisted he will have “very little” time to use the ballroom. He recently announced that it will be ready in September 2028, less than six months before his term ends.

“This is really for other presidents,” he said.

Trump sidestepped a question about whether he’ll kick in any more of his own money if Congress rejects the $1-billion funding request.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump’s tour was not in response to the difficulties brewing in Congress. “President Trump is the most transparent president of all time and was excited to showcase to the press and American people the amazing gift he is giving to the White House and generations of future presidents to come,” Ingle said.

Trump also touched on some of the other beautification projects he’s undertaking across the city, such as restarting dormant park fountains. He claimed to be spending much less to clean up the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool than did his immediate predecessors — both Democrats.

“I’m doing a job on the Reflecting Lake for a fraction of what they paid,” Trump said. He’s having the surface coated in a shade of blue and wants to reopen it by July 4. A separate nonprofit group, the Cultural Landscape Foundation, has sued to halt this project.

Superville writes for the Associated Press.

Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Tehran says Iranian leaders are ‘projecting defiance’ and rejecting ‘public pressure’ from the US.