Five-time Pro Bowl edge rusher Maxx Crosby is heading to the Baltimore Ravens, two people with knowledge of the trade told The Associated Press on Friday night.
Both people spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal can’t be announced until the NFL’s new year starts next week.
The Las Vegas Raiders will receive two first-round picks from the Ravens, including the No. 14 overall pick in next month’s NFL draft, one of the people said.
The 28-year-old Crosby had 10 sacks last season and has reached double digits four times in his seven seasons.
CHICAGO — From former presidents to an NBA Hall of Famer to prominent church pastors, stories of the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.’s influence on politics, corporate boardrooms, and picket lines loomed large Friday at a celebration honoring the late civil rights leader.
Thousands of people gathered at a church on Chicago’s South Side to pay a final public tribute to Jackson.
The celebration — with appearances by Grammy-winning gospel singers and Jennifer Hudson — felt at times like a church service and others like a political rally. Many, from former President Bill Clinton to the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader and founder of the National Action Network, likened Jackson’s death to a call to action, from speaking out against justice to voting in the midterms.
Former President Barack Obama said Jackson’s presidential runs in the 1980s set the stage for other Black leaders, including his own successful 2009 presidency and re-election.
“The message he sent to a 22-year-old child of a single mother with a funny name, an outsider, was that maybe there wasn’t any place or any room where we didn’t belong,” Obama said. “He paved the road for so many others to follow.”
Obama, joined by Clinton and former Democratic president Joe Biden at a celebration of life for Jackson, received the loudest round of applause as the three entered the chamber.
“We are living in a time when it can be hard to hope,” Obama said. “Each day we wake up to some new assault to our democratic institutions. Another setback to the idea of the rule of law, an offense to common decency. Every day you wake up to things you just didn’t think were possible.”
“Each day we are told by folks in high office to fear each other,” said Obama, referring to the current Republican leadership in Washington.
Clinton said Jackson made him a better president, while former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris talked about Jackson’s inspiring 1980s presidential runs and showed off campaign memorabilia she had kept from them. Former President Joe Biden also spoke during the service.
President Donald Trump, who praised Jackson on social media after he died and also shared photos of the two of them together, did not attend.
Thousands attend Jackson memorial service
The event honors the protégé of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate and follows memorial services that drew large crowds in Chicago and South Carolina, where Jackson was born. Friday’s celebration — at an influential Black church with a 10,000-seat arena — was expected to be the largest.
Crowds of attendees waited in long lines outside the church as television screens played excerpts of some of Jackson’s most famous speeches. Inside, vendors sold pins with his 1984 presidential slogan and hoodies with his “I Am Somebody” mantra.
Along with a slew of Illinois elected leaders, notable attendees included actor and producer Tyler Perry, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and political activist and theologian Cornel West. Detroit Pistons great and Chicago native Isiah Thomas was one of the speakers.
Marketing professional Chelsia Bryan said Friday that she decided to attend the memorial service because it was “a chance to be part of something historic.”
“As a Black woman, knowing that someone pretty much gave their life, dedicated their life to make sure I can do the things that I can do now, he’s worth honoring,” Bryan said.
Jackson Jr.: Everyone welcome
Jackson died last month at age 84 after battling a rare neurological disorder that affected his mobility and ability to speak. Family members say he continued coming into the office until last year and communicated through hand signals. His final public appearances included the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“Every single person in here has a Jesse Jackson story,” his eldest son, Jesse Jackson Jr., said Friday. “The time he shook your hand, the time he prayed for you, the time he held you up, the time he prayed the funeral for somebody you know … and he prayed you to a new course of existence.”
Sitting in the crowd was 90-year-old Mary Lovett. She said Jackson’s advocacy inspired her many times, from when she moved from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1960s, taught elementary school and became a mom. She twice voted for Jackson during both of his presidential runs and appreciated how he always spoke up for underrepresented people. “He’s gone, but I hope his legacy lives,” she said. “I hope we can remember what he tried to teach us.”
Jackson’s service was to the poor, underrepresented
Jackson’s pursuits were countless, taking him to all corners of the globe: Advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues including voting rights, healthcare, job opportunities, and education. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through Rainbow PUSH Coalition, he channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more open and equitable society.
Another son, Yusef Jackson, who runs the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, recalled how his father carried a well-worn Bible but also showed his faith by showing up to picket lines.
“He lived a revolutionary Christian faith rooted in justice, nonviolence and the moral righteousness,” Yusef Jackson said Friday. “He was deeply involved in the political struggles of his time, but his gift was that he could rise above them. It’s not about the left wing or the right wing. It takes two wings to fly. For him, the goal was always the moral center.”
Jackson’s services in Chicago and South Carolina drew civic leaders, school groups, and everyday people who said they were touched by Jackson’s work, from scholarship programs to advocating for inmates. Several states flew flags at half-staff in his honor.
Services in Washington, D.C., were tabled after a request to allow Jackson to lie in honor in the United States Capitol rotunda was denied by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said the space is typically reserved for select officials, including former presidents. Details on a future event have not been made public.
WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration’s embattled vaccine chief, Vinay Prasad, is once again leaving the agency — the second time in less than a year that he’s departed after controversial decisions involving the review of vaccinations and specialty drugs for rare diseases.
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced the news to FDA staff in an email late Friday, saying Prasad would depart at the end of April. Makary said Prasad would return to his academic job at the University of California, San Francisco.
In July, Prasad was briefly forced from his job after running afoul of biotech executives, patient groups, and conservative allies of President Donald Trump. He was reinstated less than two weeks later with the backing of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Makary.
Prasad’s latest ouster follows a string of high-profile controversies involving the FDA’s review of vaccines, gene therapies, and biotech drugs in which companies have criticized the agency for reversing itself, in some cases calling for new trials of products previously greenlighted by regulators.
In the last month, Prasad has come under fire from pharmaceutical executives, investors, members of Congress, and other critics for multiple decisions at the agency.
First, Prasad initially refused to allow the FDA to review a highly anticipated flu vaccine from drugmaker Moderna made with mRNA technology. The rejection of the application, highly unusual for the FDA, prompted Moderna to go public with Prasad’s decision and vow to formally challenge it.
A week after the rejection became public, the FDA reversed course and said it would accept the shot for review after all, pending an additional study from Moderna.
Then, in the past week, the FDA engaged in a highly unusual public fight with a small drug company developing an experimental treatment for Huntington’s disease, a fatal condition that affects about 40,000 people in the U.S.
The company, UniQure, said Monday that the FDA was demanding a new trial of its gene therapy that would involve performing a sham surgery on some of the patients in the trial. The company’s gene therapy is injected directly into the brain during a surgical procedure.
Company executives said the request for a sham-controlled trial contradicted previous FDA guidance and raised ethical concerns for patients.
On Thursday, the FDA held a highly unusual news conference with reporters to criticize the company’s therapy and defend the agency’s request for an additional study.
A senior FDA official, who requested anonymity to speak with reporters, called the company’s original study “stone cold negative.”
“We have a failed product here,” he added.
The FDA typically communicates in carefully vetted written statements when speaking about scientific disagreements, especially those involving experimental drugs that are still under the agency’s review.
Prasad’s time as the FDA’s top vaccine and biotech regulator has been marked by a series of similar disputes with the companies the agency regulates.
More than a half-dozen drugmakers studying therapies for rare or hard-to-treat diseases have received rejection letters or requests to run additional studies, adding years and potentially many millions of dollars to their development plans.
A longtime academic and critic of the FDA’s standards for drug reviews, Prasad’s approach to regulation since arriving at the FDA last May has confounded many FDA observers and critics.
On repeated occasions, Prasad joined Makary in announcing steps to make FDA drug reviews faster and easier for companies. But he also has imposed new warnings and study requirements for some biotech drugs and vaccines, particularly COVID shots that have long been a target for Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist before joining the Trump administration.
Congressional Democrats have joined a legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot triumphal arch, arguing in U.S. District Court that the project must receive congressional approval before moving forward.
The top Democrats on committees overseeing federal lands and natural resources filed an amicus brief Friday, citing the Commemorative Works Act, a 40-year-old federal law that governs the design and placement of memorials in Washington. Under the law, certain parts of the city — including Memorial Circle, a traffic roundabout near Arlington National Cemetery,which Trump is eyeing for his planned arch — are considered protected land, and monuments built there would require congressional authorization. The circle sits narrowly inside the boundaries of Washington.
“Washington D.C. is not the President’s backyard to renovate, relandscape, and build in as he sees fit,” Sens. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Angus King of Maine, and Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Reps. Jared Huffman of California, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, and Maxine Dexter of Oregon wrote in their brief. King is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
King also requested a review from the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan think tank that serves lawmakers, which independently concluded that an arch built in Memorial Circle would require congressional authorization. King’s office shared the review with the Washington Post.
“This is a straightforward issue of who’s in charge,” King said in an interview Friday. “The law is clear that any structure in this zone — of which Memorial Circle is certainly part — has to have the express approval of Congress.”
Huffman said the president’s plans raise “moral and political” questions, including whether the arch is a “vanity project” rather than a necessary monument.
“This is not Pyongyang,” Huffman said, invoking the capital of North Korea. “Most Americans want to be able to appreciate the view of Arlington Cemetery without a massive eyesore.”
The White House criticized Democrats’ legal challenge, saying that the party is “opposed to anything that celebrates the greatness of our Country” and mocking them as “America Last losers.”
“The Triumphal Arch in Memorial Circle is going to be one of the most iconic landmarks not only in Washington, D.C., but throughout the world,” spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “It will enhance the visitor experience at Arlington National Cemetery for veterans, the families of the fallen, and all Americans alike, serving as a visual reminder of the noble sacrifices borne by so many American heroes throughout our 250 year history so we can enjoy our freedoms today.”
The White House did not respond to questions about whether officials would seek congressional approval of their planned arch.
Military veterans and a historic preservationist sued the Trump administration last month, arguing that Trump’s planned arch would obstruct key views when visiting Arlington National Cemetery and interfere with the intent of nearby monuments. Public Citizen, a government watchdog organization, is seeking to halt the project until the administration secures approval from Congress and federal review panels.
The White House has yet to formally propose its arch or seek those approvals, but Trump has repeatedly said that construction will soon begin. He has also tied the arch to the nation’s 250th anniversary, with Freedom 250 — a Trump-aligned group helping plan commemorative activities this year — helping guide the project’s development.
“We’re doing one that will be more magnificent and larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,” the president said in an interview last month with NBC News, invoking the famous 164-foot-tall arch in France. Trump said that his planned arch would be “about” 250 feet high.
The Justice Department has formed a working group to examine possible federal charges against officials or entities within Cuba’s government, according to an official familiar with the group.
The formation of the group could be a significant step in the Trump administration’s public push to topple the regime in Cuba.
Officials from government agencies including the Treasury Department will be part of the recently formed group. Treasury’s involvement could mean the Trump administration is considering further sanctions against Cuba, already the subject of intense U.S. economic sanctions.
The working group is exploring potential crimes related to immigration, economics, and more. Another person familiar with the working group said federal prosecutors in Florida are also working with local partners in the state to bring potential charges against Cuban officials.
The effort to bring charges against Cuban officials coincides with President Donald Trump saying that his administration is eyeing Cuba as the next country whose government might be overthrown, following the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in early January and the killing of Iran’s supreme leader last Saturday.
“We want to finish this one first,” Trump said Thursday, referring to the current attack on Iran. It “will be just a question of time” before Cuba’s government falls, and “you and a lot of unbelievable people are going to be going back to Cuba, hopefully not to stay,” he told a White House audience that included a large number of Republicans from South Florida, many of Cuban descent.
“I just want to wait a couple of weeks,” he added. On Friday, in an interview with CNN, he repeated that Cuba “is going to fall very soon.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida — which includes Miami, the center of the Cuban exile community — will be overseeing the prosecution group, according to the official familiar with the matter, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an internal plan that has not yet been made public.
Jason Reding Quiñones, who heads the office, is also overseeing a probe aimed at former officials of the Joe Biden and Barack Obama administrations whom Trump accuses of bringing politically motivated investigations against him.
“Federal prosecutors from across the country work every day to pursue justice, which includes efforts to combat transnational crime,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.
The Cuba prosecution effort could, in part, follow the model the administration used to remove Maduro from power. The Justice Department indicted Maduro in 2020, although the leader was not extradited at the time. In January, the administration launched an attack on Venezuela, capturing Maduro and bringing him to New York to face charges.
Several former prosecutors from the Miami U.S. attorney’s office told the Washington Post that they were not surprised that the office would be leading an effort specifically focused on Cuba-related prosecutions. The Miami office has a long history of handling high-profile cases involving wrongdoing tied to the Cuban regime.
The U.S. has, for example, long charged that GAESA, a military business conglomerate that controls vast portions of the Cuban economy, including tourism, foreign imports, and currency flows, is a center of state corruption.
In 2024, the office secured the conviction of Victor Manuel Rocha, a former U.S. diplomat who admitted to gathering intelligence for Cuba for more than four decades while holding sensitive roles in the U.S. State Department and National Security Council.
Attorneys in the office also led a significant prosecution in the early 2000s against five Cuban intelligence officers who were arrested in the United States and accused of seeking to infiltrate anti-Castro Cuban American groups. The group, known as the Cuban Five, was convicted at trial. President Barack Obama released several of its members in a 2014 prisoner exchange as part of his administration’s efforts to establish more normalized relations with Cuba.
Last month, several Republican members of Florida’s congressional delegation urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to reopen an investigation into a 1996 incident, in which Cuban forces shot down two unarmed civilian planes operated by a Miami-based Cuban exile group called Brothers to the Rescue. Four people were killed.
The group was scouring nearby waters for refugees seeking to escape to the U.S. at the time.
The U.S. lawmakers, in a Feb. 13 letter, alleged that Raúl Castro, Cuba’s former president and brother of Fidel Castro, ordered the attack while serving as the head of the nation’s military.
They pushed Trump administration officials to indict him and cited audio recordings of Raúl Castro discussing the incident that they said could help build a case.
“We believe unequivocally that Raul Castro is responsible for this heinous crime,” read the letter signed by Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar, Carlos A. Gimenez, and Nicole Malliotakis. “It is time for him to be brought to justice.”
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on the efforts of two U.S. companies seeking compensation for assets seized by Cuba 65 years ago. Success in those efforts could open the door to a large number of additional lawsuits.
Officials from South Florida have also urged the Justice Department to take action against the Cuban regime over a recent incident in which Cuban soldiers opened fire on a speedboat registered in Florida as it approached the island. The gunfire killed four of the boat’s armed passengers, including a U.S. citizen, and wounded another six.
Cuban officials charged the survivors this week, alleging that they and those killed were Cubans living in the United States intent on infiltrating the island to commit acts of terrorism.
The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Reding Quiñones, expressed skepticism about that conclusion in a statement shortly after the shooting, saying: “The facts remain unclear and conflicting.”
He vowed a thorough investigation.
“We will follow the facts wherever they lead and pursue answers through every legal and diplomatic channel available,” he said. “We owe that to the victims, their families, and to the rule of law. More to come as we learn more.”
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The Florida Bar on Friday walked back what it said was an erroneous earlier statement its representatives had made indicating that it had an open investigation into Lindsey Halligan, a former top federal prosecutor in Virginia.
A letter from a bar association representative to an advocacy group that had requested an inquiry into Halligan said that there was an “investigation pending” in response to the group’s complaint.
Jennifer Krell Davis, a spokeswoman for the Florida Bar, also said Thursday that there was an “open file” but declined to comment further “as active Florida discipline cases are confidential.”
On Friday, however, Davis issued a new statement saying, “The Florida Bar wrote a letter to the complainant erroneously stating that there is a pending Bar investigation of member Lindsay Halligan. There is no such pending Bar investigation of Lindsay Halligan.”
She said the Florida Bar had received a complaint and was monitoring the “ongoing legal proceedings” but did not explain the discrepancy.
Halligan, a former White House aide for President Donald Trump, pursued cases against the president’s opponents but ultimately left the job after her appointment was deemed unlawful.
The Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog that had sought the bar inquiry, published a letter on its website in which a representative of the Florida Bar confirmed that the organization had an investigation pending.
A spokesperson for the Florida Bar had told the Associated Press on Thursday that there was an open file on Halligan but declined to comment further because disciplinary cases are confidential.
On Friday, Michelle Kuppersmith, the executive director of CfA, said the Florida Bar had not directly told them that the Feb. 4 letter contained an erroneous mention of a pending investigation. She said it’s “hard to reconcile” the Bar’s latest statement.
“If there is no longer an investigation into Halligan, the question is why not, given that three judges indicated she engaged in conduct that appears to violate ethics rules,” Kuppersmith said in a statement.
Halligan did not immediately respond to several email requests for comment about the investigation.
The complaint centers on Halligan’s brief but turbulent time as the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, historically one of the Justice Department’s most elite and prestigious prosecution offices.
Halligan secured both indictments but ran into difficulty right away as lawyers for Comey raised questions about a series of what they said were irregularities in the grand jury presentation of the case, including legal and factual errors that tainted the process. A judge in November scolded Halligan for “fundamental misstatements of the law,” including what he said was her suggestion to the grand jury that Comey did not have a Fifth Amendment right to not testify in the case.
A different judge subsequently dismissed both the Comey and James prosecutions after concluding that Halligan’s appointment by the Justice Department had been unlawful. Halligan left the position in January.
The complaint rehashes that chronology and also suggests that Halligan may have violated rules of professional conduct by continuing to hold herself out in court filings as acting U.S. attorney for the district after a judge had ruled that she was serving in the position illegally.
“In this way, Ms. Halligan appears to have issued false or misleading communications regarding herself and her services,” the complaint said.
BATON ROUGE, La. — The ambitious liver doctor would go just about anywhere in his home state to give people the hepatitis B vaccine.
Bill Cassidy offered jabs to thousands of inmates at Louisiana’s maximum-security prison in the early 2000s. A decade before that, he set up vaccine clinics in middle schools, a model hailed nationally as a success.
“He got that whole generation immunized in East Baton Rouge,” said Holley Galland, a retired doctor who worked with Cassidy vaccinating schoolchildren.
About the same time, a lawyer and environmental activist with a famous last name was starting to build the loyal anti-vaccine coalition that, two decades later, would move President Donald Trump to nominate him as the nation’s top health official.
Today, a year after now-Sen. Cassidy warily cast the vote that ensured Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ascension to that role, the Louisiana Republican’s life’s work — in medicine and in politics — is unraveling.
Newborn hepatitis B vaccination rates in the U.S. had plunged to 73% as of August, down 10 percentage points since a February 2023 high, according to research published in JAMA last month. In December, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices — remade by Kennedy — voted to revoke a two-decade-old recommendation that all newborns get the shot.
The next month, Trump endorsed U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, a Cassidy challenger in what’s shaping up to be a competitive Republican Senate primary. Letlow’s foray into politics began in 2021 when she took the seat won by her husband, left vacant after he died from COVID.
KFF Health News made multiple requests for comment from Cassidy over three months. His staff declined to make him available for an interview or provide comment. Letlow’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Rise of the skeptics
As the May primary nears, some Louisiana doctors are worried they’ve begun a long trek down a dark road when it comes to vaccine-preventable diseases.
Last year, on the day Kennedy was sworn in a thousand miles away in Washington, Louisiana’s health department stopped promoting vaccines, halting its clinics and advertising. Its communications about an ongoing whooping cough outbreak in the state have nearly ceased. It took months for the state to announce last year that two infants had died from the illness. A Louisiana child’s death from the flu was confirmed this January, and a couple of cases of measles were reported last year.
Spokespeople for the Louisiana Department of Health did not respond to questions.
When parents have concerns about vaccines, pediatrician Mikki Bouquet of Baton Rouge, La., offers them a handmade folder she created that addresses common misconceptions or fears about vaccines.
“It’s so hard to see children get sick from illnesses that they should have never gotten in the first place,” said Mikki Bouquet, a pediatrician in Baton Rouge. “You want to just scream into the void of this community over how they failed this child.”
As anti-vaccine forces have taken hold of the state and federal health departments, Cassidy has lamented the consequences.
“Families are getting sick and people are dying from vaccine-preventable deaths, and that tragedy needs to stop,” he wrote on social media last fall.
But while it is Cassidy’s duty as chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to conduct oversight of the health department, Kennedy has appeared before the committee just once since he was confirmed.
The secretary speaks at a “regular clip” with Cassidy, said Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon.
Kennedy’s department has elevated Louisiana vaccine skeptics. The state surgeon general who terminated Louisiana’s vaccine campaign, Ralph Abraham, was named deputy director of the CDC. (He left the role in February.) And Kennedy handpicked Evelyn Griffin, a Baton Rouge OB-GYN who later replaced Abraham as the state surgeon general, for an appointment to ACIP. Griffin has suggested the COVID vaccine had dangerous side effects for young patients.
Research has shown that serious side effects from the vaccinations are rare and that the shots saved millions of lives during the pandemic.
Cassidy “has really not had an outspoken chorus of policy supporters” when it comes to inoculating people, said Michael Henderson, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University. “There’s not a lot of political stakes in doing that in Louisiana if you’re a Republican.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry reprimanded Cassidy after the senator called for the state’s health department to ease access to COVID shots.
“Why don’t you just leave a prescription for the dangerous COVID shot at your district office and anyone can swing by and get one!” the Republican quipped on X in September.
On ‘eggshells’ in the exam room
On a sunny February afternoon, as Carnival floats were readied to parade the streets of New Orleans, pediatrician Katie Brown approached a basement apartment on a well-child visit. Cowboy boot pendants dangled from her ears, and a pack of diapers were clutched tightly in her arms.
The patient, a toddler who waved at the sight of visitors, was up to date on her immunizations. But when Brown suggested a COVID vaccine, the girl’s mother quickly declined, noting she had never gotten the shot either.
Many of Brown’s young patients — seen through Nest Health, which offers in-home visits covered by Louisiana’s Medicaid program — are current with their vaccines. Brown said home visits make parents more comfortable immunizing their children, but she’s still spending more time these days explaining what they’re getting in those shots.
“After COVID vaccines, that’s when some people just decided, ‘I don’t know if I trust vaccines, period,’” she said.
Across the state, vaccination rates have declined since the pandemic, falling short of the levels scientists say are required to achieve herd immunity for some deadly diseases, including measles. About 92% of Louisiana’s kindergartners have had the recommended two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.
The New Orleans Health Department has tried to step up with a $100,000 immunization campaign of its own, with clinics and billboards, during this year’s flu season, said Jennifer Avegno, the department’s director.
But the state’s absence is felt. Other parishes across Louisiana have not taken similar action, leaving doctors largely on their own to promote immunizations.
“I’ll say that with certainty,” Avegno said. “It’s been a blow to not have a statewide coordination.”
A day after Brown’s home visit, a mother in Baton Rouge shook her head when Bouquet offered a flu shot for her 10-year-old daughter in an exam room.
In the waiting room, parents could thumb through a handmade book that offers scientific facts to counter fears about vaccines. A laminated guide placed in each exam room explained the benefits of each recommended immunization.
Bouquet said she’s experimenting with ways to educate parents about vaccines without seeming overbearing. She still hasn’t figured out a surefire formula. Some parents now shut down any vaccine talk, and she worries others skip scheduling appointments to avoid the topic entirely.
“We’re having to walk on eggshells a bit to determine how to get that trust back,” Bouquet said. “And maybe these discussions can come up in future visits.”
Pro-Vax, pro-anti-Vaxxer
Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit that Kennedy helmed, worked to erode vaccine trust during the pandemic — falsely claiming, for instance, that COVID shots cause organ damage and that polio vaccines were at fault for a rise in the disease. The organization also sued the federal government over the mRNA-based COVID shots, hoping to get their emergency authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration revoked.
When Kennedy came before Cassidy’s committee in January 2025 as Trump’s nominee for health secretary, the senator-doctor saw risks if the prominent anti-vaccine lawyer was confirmed.
Cassidy described a time years ago when he loaded an 18-year-old onto a helicopter to get an emergency liver transplant. The young woman had acute hepatitis B, an incurable disease that is spread primarily through blood or bodily fluids and can lead to liver failure.
It was “the worst day of my medical career,” he said, addressing Kennedy at the witness table in front of him. “Because I thought, $50 of vaccines could have prevented this all.”
Cassidy started in politics in 2006 as a state senator, winning election to the U.S. House two years later. When he first ran for the U.S. Senate, in 2014, he charmed Louisiana voters with campaign ads showing him dressed in scrubs and a white lab coat, talking about his work with Hurricane Katrina evacuees and patients at Baton Rouge’s public hospital.
But some Republicans soured on Cassidy after he voted to convict Trump on an article of impeachment charging him with inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The impeachment vote has hampered Cassidy’s reelection bid this year in a state where Trump captured 60% of the vote in 2024.
“Cassidy has things that are associated with his name: the impeachment vote in 2021,” Henderson said.
Cassidy’s loyalty to Trump was tested again with Kennedy’s nomination. Cassidy said he endorsed Kennedy after extracting pledges that he wouldn’t tinker with the nation’s vaccination program.
But since taking office, Kennedy has largely ignored those promises, and Cassidy hasn’t publicly rebuked him.
Former Texas congressman Michael Burgess served for years with Cassidy in the House, where they were founding members of the GOP Doctors Caucus, started in 2009. He said Cassidy’s discomfort with some of Kennedy’s actions is palpable.
“You could hear some of the pain in Sen. Cassidy’s voice when he was addressing that the secretary wanted to drop the birth dose of hepatitis B,” Burgess said. “You got cases to nearly zero on hepatitis B. It was painful to him to think about taking this away from the population.”
Retired Baton Rouge nurse-practitioner Elizabeth Britton has switched her party affiliation so she can vote in the closed Republican primary for Cassidy, with whom she vaccinated inmates decades ago.
She doesn’t quite understand the “mess” in Washington that resulted in the senator voting to confirm a vaccine critic.
Watching Kennedy and others promulgate doubts about shots she once administered has made her “profoundly sad” and “angry,” she said, but most of all worried.
“It puts a pit in my stomach, because I know the consequences of people not getting the vaccine,” she said.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
The Army in recent days abruptly canceled a major training exercise for the headquarters element of an elite paratrooper unit, officials said, fueling speculation within the Defense Department that soldiers specializing in ground combat and a range of other missions may be sent to the Middle East as the conflict with Iran widens.
The 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg in North Carolina includes a brigade combat team of about 4,000 to 5,000 soldiers ready to deploy on 18 hours notice for missions as varied as seizing airfields and other critical infrastructure, reinforcing U.S. embassies, and enabling emergency evacuations. Its headquarters element is responsible for coordinating how those operations are planned and executed.
No deployment orders had been issued as of Friday, officials said, speaking like some others on the condition of anonymity to discuss the situation. They noted that the Army is expected to announce soon a previously scheduled Middle East deployment for a helicopter unit with the 82nd, but that won’t happen until later in the spring.
But the unexpected change of plans — the unit’s headquarters staff was told to stay put in North Carolina instead of joining the training event at Fort Polk in Louisiana — and the 82nd’s high-profile role in past conflicts has heightened expectations that the division’s Immediate Response Force could be called upon.
“We’re all preparing for something — just in case,” said one official familiar with the issue.
Army officials referred questions to the Pentagon, which issued a brief statement declining to provide details. “Due to operations security we do not discuss future or hypothetical movements,” the statement said.
Officials with U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, declined to comment.
President Donald Trump has offered shifting explanations for his decision to start the conflict with Iran — and said publicly that U.S. ground troops “probably” would not be needed as part of the ongoing campaign. He and his top aides have repeatedly declined to rule out that possibility, however.
The Immediate Response Force has been called upon in recent years to reinforce security at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad just ahead of the military’s killing in 2020 of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian Quds Force commander blamed for hundreds of deadly attacks on American personnel in the Middle East. It was central also to the evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021 and the show of U.S. force in Eastern Europe as Russia prepared to invade Ukraine in 2022.
Since hostilities began nearly a week ago, U.S. commanders have relied on airstrikes and naval strikes to target military sites and Tehran’s arsenal of missiles, attack drones and navy vessels. As many Iranian defenses have crumbled, U.S. forces increasingly are flying directly over Iran, dropping munitions with fighter jets, bombers and other aircraft.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that sending American ground troops into Iran was “not part of the current plan, but I’m not going to remove an option for the president that is on the table.”
At a Pentagon news briefing earlier in the day, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declined to comment when asked about “U.S. boots on the ground,” saying that’s a “question for policymakers.”
“I don’t make policy,” Caine added. “I execute policy.”
As the Post reported last week, Caine had warned the White House that munitions shortfalls and a lack of broad military support from other U.S. allies would add considerable risk to any operation in Iran and to the personnel put in harm’s way. The Trump administration has sought to downplay those concerns.
Caine appeared at Wednesday’s news conference alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who earlier in the week also refused to rule out the possibility that ground combat troops could be sent into Iran.
Adm. Charles “Brad” Cooper, who oversees the campaign as head of Central Command, said in a news conference Thursday in Tampa, Fla., that U.S. combat power in the region is still building as Iran’s declines. Fewer and fewer Iranian missiles and drones have been launched in the past few days, he said.
By flying directly over Iran, Cooper said, U.S. forces are hitting its “center of gravity directly with overwhelming power and reach.” That includes, he said, B-2 bombers dropping 2,000-pound bombs on underground ballistic missile launchers.
More than 50,000 U.S. troops are involved in the operation and six U.S. soldiers have been killed as Iran has mounted a ferocious counterattack targeting American positions and interests throughout the Middle East. Trump has said there will “likely be more” U.S. military fatalities before the campaign concludes, adding: “That’s the way it is.”
The president and his top aides have been noncommittal on a timeline for ending the conflict. Trump has said it could last four to five weeks but “we have the capability to go far longer than that.”
One prevailing concern, officials say, is the military’s limited stockpile of certain key weapons. The Pentagon is rapidly burning through its supply of precision arms and air-defense interceptors, people familiar with the matter have said. Senior Pentagon officials have denied there are any problems, noting that with Iranian defenses crumbling, U.S. forces are shifting heavily to strikes from manned aircraft with munitions that are plentiful.
“We’ve got no shortages of munitions,” Hegseth said Thursday, speaking alongside Cooper. “Our stockpiles of defensive and offensive weapons allow us to sustain this campaign as long as we need to.”
If the administration elects to send ground forces into Iran, one early target, analysts have said, could be Kharg Island. Located about 15 miles from the mainland in the Persian Gulf, the island is home to some of Tehran’s most significant oil infrastructure, with about 90% of the country’s oil exports moving through facilities there.
A U.S. seizure of Kharg Island would give the Trump administration control of a centerpiece of the Iranian economy but leave U.S. troops vulnerable to attack.
Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called securing Kharg Island a “no-brainer” and said it appears that the Trump administration appears to be “coming around to the idea that Iran is a much greater problem set than perhaps they went in thinking.”
While U.S. troops could take incoming fire if deployed there, Rubin said, capturing the island would give the United States significant strategic advantages, including potentially choking off Tehran’s ability to pay its military.
Securing Iran’s most significant oil infrastructure also would follow a pattern for Trump, who has previously sought to secure oil wealth for the United States through the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January and intervention in Syria during his first term in office.
Still, deploying ground forces into Iran could pose significant political risk for the president, who is facing anti-war opposition from Democrats and a wing of his own Republican Party.
A poll by CNN published Sunday found that 12% of respondents favor sending ground troops to Iran, while 60% oppose it and 28% are unsure.
Last week, FBI Director Kash Patel fired roughly a dozen agents and staff members who once had ties to an investigation of Donald Trump. Among them were agents who specialized in addressing threats from Iran and its proxies.
Three days after the firings began, the United States was bombarding Iran.
The fighting abroad poses a major test for a Justice Department and FBI reeling from mass firings, reassignments, and departures during Trump’s 14 months in office for his second term, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity either out of concern about retaliation or to discuss continuing investigations.
The FBI and Justice Department still have skilled leaders in many key national security positions, the people said, but they warned that the bench of expertise has significantly thinned over the past year, and the number of leaders with deep expertise in handling domestic threats has diminished.
Thinner ranks, especially of experienced staff members, can matter in multiple ways, the current and former officials said.
When the U.S. is engaged in conflict abroad, domestic law enforcement goes into high alert. FBI agents with national security experience sift through scores of possible threats, determining which are worth investigating further, which may be tied to terrorist groups — and which do not need to be followed up on.
For serious threats, FBI agents often coordinate with Justice Department prosecutors to determine whether and how to execute warrants to surveil and arrest people before any possible violence occurs.
Today, experienced agents and prosecutors are more scarce. At the FBI, the recent terminations came on top of scores of firings of agents and field-office leaders that Patel has ordered during his tenure, often without explanation.
One former prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to broadly discuss an investigation that has not been made public, said he worked last year with more than a half-dozen FBI agents to surveil a man who officials feared may have been planning a violent attack.
FBI agents surveilled the man 24-7, the former prosecutor said. But Patel reassigned those agents to work on immigration, and the FBI’s capabilities to trail that suspect around-the-clock waned, the prosecutor said.
As of October, roughly 25% of FBI agents had been assigned to immigration enforcement, stretching thin an already busy workforce.
Each termination of an experienced agent also rids the bureau of years of source building, the current and former officials said.
It’s impossible to know for sure what impact such departures have on the ability to track threats, they said. But, they said, each of the Iranian experts the FBI has lost probably had sources in and around Iranian American communities that they used to help monitor specific threats and people. Such source relationships, which are built on trust, cannot easily be transferred and are typically severed when agents leave.
FBI spokesman Ben Williamson defended the bureau on social media. The recent firing of agents happened because “they acted unethically and violated the mission,” he said, adding that three agents with Iran expertise were ousted. The bureau did not answer questions about how the agents acted unethically or violated the FBI’s mission.
“While we do not comment on personnel matters, the FBI maintains a robust counterintelligence operation, with personnel all over the country, who delivered record results in 2025 — including a 35% increase in counterintelligence arrests, six of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives captured, and multiple foiled terrorism plots just in December alone,” Williamson said in a statement. “Our teams remain fully engaged across the country and prepared to mobilize any security assets needed to assist federal partners — as well as state and local law enforcement.”
There’s no question, however, that the administration’s firings across the Justice Department and FBI have created big gaps in expertise across the law enforcement agency. The staffing losses have been widespread, hitting U.S. attorneys offices, FBI field offices and critical divisions at headquarters in Washington. The Justice Department has struggled to fill many of these slots with qualified people, the Washington Post has reported.
The firings started on Day One of the Trump administration. Top Justice Department leaders pushed out Bruce Swartz, the deputy for international affairs in the criminal division, who had worked at the department for decades. Michael Nordwall, who headed the FBI’s criminal and cyber investigations division, and Robert Wells, whose portfolio included all of national security for the FBI, were also pushed out.
At the time, The Post reported that Brian Driscoll — the acting FBI director while Patel was awaiting Senate confirmation — fought to keep Nordwall and Wells, saying their expertise was needed. Driscoll lost that fight. He subsequently was also pushed out by Patel.
George Toscas — a veteran national security prosecutor who, in previous administrations, would have been overseeing the threats cases — was also ousted.
Some of the removed leaders have been replaced with others who have years of experience in the department, the people interviewed said. In many cases, however, talented employees were promoted before they otherwise would have been, cutting short their training for senior positions. Others, they said, are unqualified for their jobs.
Further stretching the national security leadership, Matthew Blue — the chief of the Justice Department’s counterterrorism section — is an Air Force veteran who has been serving in the D.C. National Guard since August. Trump deployed the D.C. National Guard to tackle “out of control” crime in the nation’s capital.
One of Blue’s deputy chiefs, a longtime Justice Department prosecutor, has been serving as acting chief in his absence.
Firings in other parts of the Justice Department can also have a ripple effect. Kyle Boynton — a former Civil Rights Division prosecutor and FBI agent who left the Justice Department in 2025 — noted that prosecutors who have reason to fear a person is planning a violent act can sometimes bring charges of an attempt to commit a hate crime before they carry out a violent attack. That can be a critical tool in preventing attacks, he said.
As a prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division, Boynton said he would receive calls from FBI agents when they were tracking a threat against a synagogue, for example. He would help determine what search warrants or surveillance measures they could legally request. Boynton said he fears that few people remain in the division’s criminal section who have handled such investigations.
The entire leadership of the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division has departed or been ousted in recent months, two people familiar with staffing in the division said.
“It requires an enormous amount of manpower to track people before they commit a crime,” Boynton said. “What you are looking for is evidence of intent and evidence that they have taken substantial steps in furtherance of intent. That requires an enormous amount of attention and scrutiny by FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors.”
Current and former Justice Department attorneys said they are frustrated that the Trump administration, including Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, did not appear to carefully consider the long-term ramifications of their staffing decisions.
“We are now in a heightened-threat situation, not just in the Mideast but also here in the U.S. Iran, acting through its proxies, has long sought to carry out a terrorist attack or assassination inside the country,” said one longtime former senior National Security official.
“The danger today is that we have lost so much of our capability to uncover and stop such an attack,” the official said. “We have let down our guard at the worst time.”
CAIRO — The Trump administration is confronting mounting discontent from allies in the Persian Gulf who have complained they were not given adequate time to prepare for the torrent of Iranian drones and missiles bombarding their countries in retaliation for strikes launched by the U.S. and Israel.
Officials from two Gulf countries said their governments were disappointed in the way the U.S. has handled the war, particularly the initial attack on Iran on Feb. 28. They said their countries were not given advance notice of the U.S.-Israeli attack and complained the U.S. had ignored their warnings that the war would have devastating consequences for the entire region.
One of the officials said that Gulf countries were frustrated and even angry that the U.S. military has not defended them enough. He said there is belief in the region that the operation has focused on defending Israel and American troops, while leaving Gulf countries to protect themselves, and said that his country’s stock of interceptors was “rapidly depleting.”
Like others in this story, the Gulf officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing a confidential diplomatic matter.
The governments of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates did not respond to requests for comment.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in response: “Iran’s retaliatory ballistic missile attacks have decreased by 90% because Operation Epic Fury is crushing their ability to shoot these weapons or produce more. President Trump is in close contact with all of our regional partners, and the terrorist Iranian regime’s attacks on its neighbors prove how imperative it was that President Trump eliminate this threat to our country and our allies.”
The Pentagon did not respond.
Official reactions by the Gulf Arab countries have been muted, but public figures with close ties to their governments have been openly critical of the U.S., suggesting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dragged President Donald Trump into a needless war.
“This is Netanyahu’s war,” Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief, told CNN on Wednesday. “He somehow convinced the president [Trump] to support his views.”
Pentagon officials conceded this week in closed-door briefings with lawmakers they are struggling to stop waves of drones launched by Iran, leaving some U.S. targets in the Gulf region, including troops, vulnerable.
The Gulf countries have emerged as valuable targets for Iran, well within the range of Iran’s short-range missiles and filled with targets, including American troops, high-profile business and tourist locations and energy facilities, disrupting the world’s flow of oil.
Since the start of the war, Iran has fired at least 380 missiles and over 1,480 drones targeting the five Arab Gulf countries, according to an AP tally based on official statements. At least 13 people have been killed in those countries, according to local officials.
In addition, six U.S. soldiers were killed in Kuwait on Sunday when an Iranian drone strike hit an operations center in a civilian port, more than 10 miles from the main Army base. The husband of one of the slain soldiers, who was part of a supply and logistics unit based in Iowa, said the operations center was a shipping container-style building and had no defenses.
In briefings for members of Congress on Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers that the U.S. will not be able to intercept many of the incoming UAVs, especially the Shaheds, according to three people familiar with the briefings.
In one of the briefings, Caine and Hegseth did not offer any details when pressed by lawmakers why the U.S. did not seem prepared for Iran to launch waves of drones at U.S. targets in the region, according to one of the people.
That person, a U.S. official who is familiar with the U.S. security posture in Gulf region, said that the U.S. did not have widespread capabilities throughout the Gulf region to effectively counter waves of the one-way drones coming to places outside conventional targets or bases outside of Iraq and Syria.
Drone attacks this week at the embassy in Saudi Arabia caused a limited fire at the embassy in Riyadh, and another drone attack the United Arab Emirates sparked a small fire outside the U.S. consulate in Dubai.
Bader Mousa Al-Saif, a Kuwait-based analyst with Chatham House, said the U.S. appeared to have underestimated the risk to its Gulf Arab allies, believing American troops and Israel would be the primary targets of Iranian retaliation.
“I don’t think they saw that there would be as much exposure to the Gulf,” he said, saying the lack of a plan to protect the Gulf countries “speaks to U.S. short-sightedness.”
The frustration in some of the Gulf nations is driven in part by the relative success that Israel has had knocking down drones and missiles compared to some of their neighbors, according to a person familiar with the sensitive diplomatic matter who was not authorized to comment publicly.
Their air defense systems are hardly as robust as Israel’s, but according to the person, U.S. officials have been somewhat perplexed that the Gulf countries are still not showing an appetite for delivering a counteroffensive by launching missiles at Iranian targets.
Elliott Abrams, who served as a special representative for Iran and Venezuela at the end of Trump’s first term, said that U.S. national security officials and their Gulf allies were aware that Iran had the capability to carry out significant strikes.
“And the neighbors knew it and were afraid of it. But it was never clear that Iran would actually do it, because they have a lot to lose,” Abrams said. “These attacks will leave long-term enmity, and if they keep up, the Gulf Arabs may start attacking Iran.”
Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said that while the Gulf countries have an interest in seeing Iran weakened, they also have key concerns about the ongoing war — including the economic damage and instability it is causing and its open-ended nature.
Ratney, who is now a senior adviser in the Middle East program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: “What comes next? The countries of the Gulf will have to bear the brunt of whatever that is.”
