Category: National Politics

When Congress created the Commission of Fine Arts more than a century ago, its members were intended to be “well-qualified judges of the fine arts” who would review and advise on major design projects in the nation’s capital, lawmakers wrote. The initial slate of commissioners included Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., architects and urban planners who designed much of Washington.

Now, the 116-year-old commission is set to include its newest, youngest member: Chamberlain Harris, a 26-year-old White House aide and a longtime executive assistant for President Donald Trump, who is slated to be sworn in at the panel’s next public meeting on Thursday.

Trump’s selection of Harris — who was known as the “receptionist of the United States” during the president’s first term and has no notable arts expertise — comes amid the president’s push to install allies on the arts commission and another panel, the National Capital Planning Commission. Both commissions are reviewing Trump’s planned White House ballroom and are expected to review his other Washington-area construction projects, such as his desired 250-foot triumphal arch.

Trump has said he hopes to complete the projects as quickly as possible, despite complaints about their size, design, and potential impact on Washington. A historical preservation group has sued the administration over the ballroom project, saying that Trump should have consulted with the federal review panels before tearing down the White House’s East Wing annex and beginning construction on his planned 90,000-square-foot, $400 million ballroom.

A federal judge weighing whether to halt the ballroom project in December had instructed the White House to go through the commissions before beginning construction.

Asked about Harris’s qualifications to serve on the fine arts commission, the White House on Tuesday touted her as a “loyal, trusted, and highly respected adviser” to the president.

“She understands the President’s vision and appreciation of the arts like very few others, and brings a unique perspective that will serve the Commission well,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said in a statement. “She will be a tremendous asset to the Commission of Fine Arts and continue to honorably serve our country well.”

Harris, who holds the title of deputy director of Oval Office operations, received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2019 from the University at Albany, SUNY, with minors in communications and economics, according to an archived copy of her resumé on LinkedIn. She continued working for Trump as an executive assistant when he was out of office.

Harris was one of seven fine arts commissioners Trump appointed during a 19-day spree in January. The president had left the commission empty for months after firing all six members in October but raced to restock the panel ahead of the agency’s January meeting when the ballroom project was first added to the agenda.

Former fine arts commissioners said they could not recall a commissioner in the panel’s history with as little prior arts experience as Harris. Several former commissioners also noted that Trump has installed multiple appointees with minimal arts and urban planning expertise on both panels set to review his construction projects remaking Washington.

“It’s disastrous,” said Alex Krieger, an architect and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, who was chosen for the commission in 2012 by President Barack Obama and served a second term in the first Trump administration. “Some of these people just have no qualifications to evaluate matters of design, architecture, or urban planning.”

Past commissioners have included Billie Tsien, an architect currently working on Obama’s library, and Perry Guillot, a landscape architect who redesigned the White House Rose Garden during Trump’s first term.

Witold Rybczynski, an architect who was chosen for the Commission of Fine Arts by President George W. Bush and served a second term under Obama, wrote in an email that President Joe Biden also reshaped the panel by firing Trump appointees before their terms had concluded. He also noted that past presidents installed some political appointees and lesser-known experts to the panel, too.

“The degree of expertise … has varied,” Rybczynski wrote in an email. He is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor Emeritus of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.

The fine arts commission on Thursday is slated to review the latest ballroom designs and may vote to advance the project. The White House has said it hopes to win formal approval from both review panels by March and begin aboveground construction of the ballroom as early as April.

The Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute President Donald Trump’s critics entered a new phase this week, when federal prosecutors failed to indict six Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video reminding military service members of their duty to refuse illegal orders.

Department lawyers, under pressure from the president, previously targeted several of Trump’s most outspoken foes, including former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both faced since-dismissed charges last year over alleged conduct unrelated to their political views.

But the case federal prosecutors put before a grand jury Tuesday — seeking to charge Sens. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) and four others over their 90-second video message — marked the first time the department has directly sought to classify critical speech from prominent Trump detractors as a crime.

The other lawmakers who participated in the video included Reps. Jason Crow, a former Army ranger from Colorado, and Maggie Goodlander, a Navy veteran from New Hampshire, as well as Chrissy Houlahan, a former Air Force officer, and Chris Deluzio, a former Navy officer, both from Pennsylvania.

Grand jurors roundly rejected the effort, the Washington Post reported. But legal observers and the lawmakers at the center of the probe have argued in the days since that the panel’s decision is almost beside the point.

“This is not a good news story,” Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, told reporters during a news conference this week. “This is a story about how Donald Trump and his cronies are trying to break our system to silence anyone who lawfully speaks out against them.”

The attempt to charge the lawmakers represents an evolution of the campaign that began last year with cases against James and Comey, said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College.

“Prosecuting people for speech criticizing the president is in some ways even more dangerous,” Nyhan said, “especially given these are legislators acting in their public role and especially given that they were calling for the military and national security state to follow the law.”

Still, some Trump allies in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), defended the administration’s efforts. He told reporters that Slotkin, Kelly, and the others “probably should be indicted.”

“Any time you’re obstructing law enforcement and getting in the way of these sensitive operations, it’s a very serious thing, and it probably is a crime,” he said.

The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into the lawmakers began after the video organized by Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, was posted online in November. In it, she and the others, all of whom served in the military or with intelligence agencies, reminded service members of their duty, spelled out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to resist unlawful directives.

“This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens,” the lawmakers said. “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

The video did not single out any specific Trump administration policies. But Slotkin and Kelly, both of whom serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee, have sharply criticized the president for military strikes he authorized on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean and his decision to deploy the National Guard to cities run by Democratic officials.

Their video drew an immediate reaction from Trump, who demanded on social media that the lawmakers face prosecution for sedition and suggested they should even, perhaps, be punished with execution.

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump wrote in one social media post soon after the video was posted. He said in another: “IT WAS SEDITION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL, AND SEDITION IS A MAJOR CRIME.”

The messages echoed another Trump post from last year in which he, in a missive addressed to “Pam,” an apparent reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi, insisted the Justice Department move swiftly to prosecute Comey, James, and others.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote then, adding, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Within months, James was indicted on counts of mortgage fraud, while Comey was charged with lying to Congress. Both denied the accusations and their cases were later dismissed by a federal judge over technical issues with the appointment of the prosecutor who had charged them.

Slotkin, Kelly, and the other lawmakers have maintained they did nothing wrong — even as top administration officials have accused them of using the video to encourage service members to take actions tantamount to mutiny.

Earlier this month, four of the lawmakers in the video disclosed that they had been approached by FBI agents and declined to give voluntary interviews to prosecutors.

“It was clearly, when our lawyers sat down with them, just about checking a box and doing what the president wanted them to do,” Slotkin said Wednesday. “Their heart wasn’t even in it.”

It is not clear whether the FBI took other steps to investigate. But on Tuesday, prosecutors under the supervision of D.C.’s U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News host and staunch Trump ally, presented a case against the lawmakers to the grand jury.

Two political appointees led that presentation, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sealed court proceedings.

The prosecutors — Steven Vandervelden, a former colleague of Pirro’s in the district attorney’s office in Westchester, New York, and Carlton Davis, a former staffer for House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) — sought to charge the lawmakers with a felony crime that makes it illegal to “interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States,” the people said.

But when it came time to vote, none of the grand jurors agreed there was sufficient probable cause to charge any of the lawmakers with a crime, one of the people familiar said.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and for Pirro have declined to comment on the matter in the days since. Amid that silence, the effort has drawn an impassioned response from Capitol Hill.

“The fact that they failed to incarcerate a United States senator should not obviate our outrage,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) said during a heated session Wednesday in which Democratic senators implored their Republican colleagues to openly condemn the Justice Department’s actions. Senate Democrats held a special caucus meeting Thursday morning to further discuss the situation.

“They tried to incarcerate two of us,” Schatz said. “I am not entirely sure the United States Senate can survive this if we do not have Republicans standing up.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (North Carolina) has emerged as one of the few Republicans to publicly rebuke the department. He described the failed attempt to prosecute as exactly the type of weaponization of the justice system that the Trump administration has said it is fighting against.

“Political lawfare is not normal, not acceptable, and needs to stop,” Tillis wrote in a post to X.

At their news conference Wednesday, Kelly told reporters that he and Slotkin learned about the attempt to indict them Tuesday through media reports.

“If things had gone a different way, we’d be preparing for arrest,” Slotkin said.

Since then, lawyers for several of the targeted lawmakers have sent letters to Pirro and Bondi seeking assurances that the investigation is over and that prosecutors will not seek to indict them again. They’ve also instructed the department to retain all records of the investigation threatening potential legal action for violating the lawmakers’ free-speech rights.

In a separate suit filed by Kelly, a federal judge Thursday halted Defense Department efforts to formally censure the senator over his video remarks, saying the effort to do so “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.”

“The intimidation was the point — to get other people beyond us to think twice about speaking out,” Slotkin said Wednesday. “But the real question is if the president can do this to us — sitting senators — who else can he do it to?”

The Trump administration spent more than $40 million last year to send hundreds of migrants to at least two-dozen countries that are not their own, a tactic Senate Democrats described in a report Friday as a costly strategy aimed at sowing fear and intimidation in the president’s mass deportation campaign.

The 30-page analysis from the minority members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee accuses the administration of entering into opaque financial agreements with foreign governments — including some with poor records on corruption and human rights — to rapidly expand a program for “third country” removals that once had been reserved for exceptional circumstances.

Its authors contend that the State Department has failed to conduct sufficient oversight to ensure that payments to those countries are not being misspent and that migrants transferred to their custody are not being abused or mistreated.

The administration “has expanded and institutionalized a system in which the United States urges or coerces countries to accept migrants who are not their citizens, often through arrangements that are costly, inefficient and poorly monitored,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote in a letter to colleagues. “Deporting migrants to countries they have no connection to … has become a routine instrument of diplomacy.”

Administration officials have said they have no choice but to partner with foreign governments that are willing to accept undocumented immigrants whose native nations are not willing to take them back. In most cases, the migrants have criminal records, authorities said, though public records have shown that some have not been convicted of crimes in the United States.

The report from Senate Democrats, which provides the most comprehensive look at the administration’s third-country removal program, found that the U.S. government has sent migrants to two-dozen third countries. The analysis focused primarily on five nations — El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, Eswatini, and Palau — with which the Trump administration has entered into direct financial payments totaling $32 million, a committee member involved in the report said. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the analysis ahead of its release.

Under those agreements, U.S. authorities sent about 250 Venezuelan migrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador last spring, while 29 migrants have been deported to Equatorial Guinea, 15 to Eswatini, and seven to Rwanda, the report said. None has been sent to Palau.

The report also estimated that the administration has spent more than $7 million in costs related to deportation flights to 10 of the third countries.

“Millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent without meaningful oversight or accountability,” Shaheen wrote in her letter. “And speed and deterrence are being prioritized over due process and respect for human rights.”

Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said the report shows the “unprecedented” work the administration has undertaken in its first year to enforce immigration laws.

“Astonishingly, some in Congress still want to go back to a time just 14 months ago when cartels had free rein to poison Americans and our border was open,” Pigott said in a statement. “Make no mistake, President Trump has brought Biden’s era of mass illegal immigration to an end, and we are all safer for it.”

The third-country strategy has provoked public blowback and legal challenges that have slowed the administration’s efforts and, in some instances, forced it to change course.

Last spring, President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law targeting enemy combatants, which provided the administration’s legal rationale to send the Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. Administration officials accused many of being members of the Tren de Aragua transnational gang, though some of their families and attorneys disputed that contention.

The men were later transferred from El Salvador to Venezuela under a prisoner swap. On Thursday, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the administration must bring some of the Venezuelan deportees back to the United States as they pursue legal challenges to their removals.

“It is worth emphasizing that this situation would never have arisen had the Government simply afforded Plaintiffs their constitutional rights before initially deporting them,” Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg wrote in his ruling.

The analysis from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority was put together over a period of more than eight months, based on conversations with foreign government and U.S. government officials, attorneys for deportees and immigrant rights organizations, according to the committee staffer.

The staffer said the goal of the report is to highlight the costs of the administration’s approach at a time when Democrats are concerned that the U.S. government is “entering a new phase” of speeding up the number of third-country agreements, along with the pace of deportations.

The report faults the administration for pursuing its deportation policies at the expense of other U.S. interests, including promoting human rights and punishing corrupt foreign regimes.

The authors said the Trump administration’s payment of $7.5 million to Equatorial Guinea to accept immigrants was more than the amount of foreign assistance the United States provided to that country in the previous eight years. They cited a 2025 State Department report on human trafficking that cited U.S. concerns about “corruption and official complicity in trafficking crimes” in that country.

The report also said the Trump administration was moving hastily to carry out third-country removals without trying to negotiate with the home countries of some deportees. In one case, a man initially deported to Eswatini was later sent to his home nation of Jamaica, where government officials said they had never told the United States that they were unwilling to accept him.

“As a result, the Trump Administration has, in some cases, paid twice for migrants’ travel — once to remove them to a third country and then again to fly them to their home country,” the report says.