Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Dan Driscoll handed President Trump his resignation on Monday, closing an 18-month run as Secretary of the Army that opened with one of the friendlier confirmation votes of the second term and ended in a losing internal fight. The break was not over Iran, or the budget, or anything an enemy did. It was over…
Federal courtrooms have not been kind to Donald Trump’s push to redraw the line on birthright citizenship. But on Friday, in a federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Maryland, something different happened. The same judge who tore up his first attempt at this a year ago sat across from the same coalition of immigrant-rights lawyers, heard the…
President Donald Trump set a hard deadline of Wednesday, August 26, for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook to explain herself or lose her seat on the most powerful economic board in the country. Cook used the day not to plead but to plant her feet. Her attorney delivered a blistering rebuttal to the White House…
Attorney General Todd Blanche has done something Washington left dormant for more than three decades: he has created a working route for Americans barred by federal law from possessing firearms to ask for their rights back. The move puts the Trump administration squarely on the side of individualized Second Amendment relief while keeping violent and…
For six years, congressional Republicans have argued that the federal government’s own pandemic scientists worked to bury the question of where COVID-19 came from, and for six years those scientists have called the accusation a smear. On Tuesday afternoon, in a federal courtroom in Greenbelt, Maryland, one of them stopped arguing. David M. Morens, 78,…
Attorney General Todd Blanche sat for his first Sunday show interview since the Senate confirmed him, and he was handed the question every modern attorney general has learned to answer with a soothing yes. He refused to give it. Asked on NBC’s Meet the Press whether he could pledge that the Justice Department would always…
President Donald Trump’s fight to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve is back on, six weeks after the Supreme Court told him he could not simply throw her out. In late June the justices temporarily blocked Trump’s first attempt to fire the Fed governor, stressing that the central bank should stay free of political…
Karoline Leavitt, the fast-talking conservative who turned the White House briefing room into a nightly brawl with the national press corps, is walking away from the most visible communications job in American politics. President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that Leavitt will leave her post as White House press secretary at the end of August,…
Todd Blanche survived the kind of Senate vote that turns every empty chair and every party defection into a crisis. Two Republicans joined every Democrat and independent who voted against him, but President Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee still crossed the line, 50-49. The result gives Trump a Senate-confirmed leader at the Justice Department after…
Todd Blanche spent the weekend doing the one thing a nominee never wants to do: writing down, in a binding order, that a $1.8 billion pot of money he had approved was dead. It worked well enough to get him out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. It did not work well enough to…
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