Category: Nation & World

WASHINGTON — The White House directed FBI Director Kash Patel to oversee a leak investigation into reporting by the New York Times about security issues with the new Air Force One, leading to a flurry of subpoenas to several Times reporters Friday night, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Patel scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than FBI headquarters — a major departure from historical practice. Patel also briefed senior administration officials on the investigation, two people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions.

The White House’s deep involvement in the case came after officials said President Donald Trump was enraged about the coverage of the Qatari-donated plane, which the Times reported Thursday lacks the same defensive countermeasures of the previous Air Force One.

Trump flew on the new jet to a NATO meeting in Turkey this past week but was forced to change to the old plane when he departed because of Secret Service concerns, as the Times reported Wednesday.

Patel’s role in the investigation, in close coordination with top administration officials, reflects a further dismantling of the wall that had separated the White House and the FBI in previous administrations. The government’s effort to immediately seek information from journalists, when such cases are typically centered first on identifying potential internal wrongdoing by officials, comes as the Trump administration has intensified pressure on news organizations.

In response to a request for comment, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said, “President Trump is laser focused on helping the American people and keeping them safe. That will always be his priority.”

Emily Covington, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, sought to downplay the unusual nature of the subpoenas, some of which were delivered late Friday directly to the doors of the reporters’ homes.

“Every administration has addressed the crime of leaking national security information,” she said in a statement. “To the extent that we have to investigate breaches of national security, that’s something that we will continue to do.”

She added: “To be clear, reporters are not the targets. Those leaking classified information are.”

Ben Williamson, an FBI spokesperson, said in a statement: “Director Patel and White House officials agreed to meet on Friday at the White House to brief an ongoing matter. While we would not comment further, other speculative reporting regarding the nature of the meeting is absolutely false.”

One person briefed on the conversations said that Patel had his own concerns about the type of information publicly disclosed about the plane. Another person said that Patel went to the White House of his own volition to oversee the investigation.

Trump had sought the rapid retrofitting of the Qatari-donated 747 after he learned that two new Boeing planes that were supposed to replace the aging ones used as presidential aircraft would be delayed for years.

Trump has basked in the luxury of the new plane, which is more than a decade old but has the kind of opulent furnishings the president prefers. He has repeatedly described the Qatari jet as cost free to the United States. But in reality, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were spent to upgrade its security systems. Officials have said that he plans to take the plane with him as a donation to his presidential library when he leaves office.

While Trump has said the Qatari plane was upgraded with the necessary security “bells and whistles,” the Times reported Thursday that it lacks the defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities.

Experts said the absence of the capabilities creates a potential risk when Air Force One is flying overseas, not only for the president but for the large entourage of White House staff members, Secret Service officials, journalists, and guests who fly aboard.

After the Secret Service urged him to fly the old Air Force One out of Ankara, Turkey, Trump announced that he was making a swap in aircraft. In a post on social media, he claimed that he was taking the older plane to the United Kingdom for “old time’s sake” and that he wanted to show the new jet to U.S. troops on a military base there.

Once he landed at Mildenhall Air Force Base in England, he walked from the older plane to the Qatari-donated jet, which transported him back to the United States.

When the Times and other news organizations began reporting this past week on the security issues with the new plane, the president was livid, according to an official with knowledge of his comments who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Before the Times’ first article was published, a senior official at the FBI contacted a reporter and a senior editor to ask that the article be held, calling it an issue of national security. The FBI official declined to explain the security issue. The official also asked the Times to disclose its sources for the article. The newspaper refused to do so.

On Friday, after Patel left the White House, he posted a message on social media confirming that he had been there, and said that “the fake news will find out why soon.”

That night, 48 hours after the Times had published the first article on the new plane, its reporters were served with subpoenas demanding that they provide evidence before a grand jury Wednesday.

In a statement, David McCraw, the Times’ top newsroom lawyer, said: “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

The rapid escalation of the case is a sharp departure from past national security leak investigations. Typically, officials first seek to establish how many people have had access to the information that was made public. Depending on the size of that group, prosecutors then attempt to determine ways to eliminate potential suspects from the list. In past leak cases, such efforts have often been abandoned if the pool of potential leakers is simply too large to scrutinize.

Historically, the Justice Department has sought to subpoena reporters only as a last resort after other reasonable options have been exhausted.

The Trump administration has pushed for a number of leak investigations, several of which have been conducted by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia. Those efforts, which included subpoenas to reporters from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, foundered in the face of resistance from a federal judge, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Federal prosecutors withdrew them last month.

The subpoenas issued to Times reporters Friday were from a different jurisdiction, the Southern District of New York, and were sought by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, who was recently nominated by Trump to serve as the director of national intelligence.

The subpoenas seek the reporters’ testimony on the same day Clayton is set to face a Senate confirmation hearing for his new post. The same day, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is set to take part in a confirmation hearing to serve as attorney general on a permanent basis.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

OTTAWA, Ontario — Despite the best efforts of President Donald Trump, the Gordie Howe International Bridge spanning Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, will open on July 27, the government of Canada announced on Friday evening.

The soaring 6.4 billion Canadian-dollar ($4.5 billion) structure has reshaped the skylines of the two border cities, between which roughly $300 million in trade flows each day. It is also precisely the kind of large infrastructure project Prime Minister Mark Carney has championed as a bulwark against the economic damage caused by Trump’s trade war with Canada.

Two senior officials in the United States said the two countries reached a deal on Thursday about how tolls would be distributed, allowing the bridge to finally open.

The bridge was largely finished early this year, nearly 13 years after Canada and Michigan signed an agreement that allowed construction to begin — a timeline stretched by pandemic-related delays.

In February, Trump said in a rambling social media post that he intended to block the bridge’s opening. A ceremony scheduled for early June was called off after invitations had already gone out, and the Trump administration spent the months that followed his first post offering shifting explanations for the president’s opposition.

Trump’s initial post came hours after Matthew Moroun, the billionaire scion of the family that has owned the Ambassador Bridge upstream from the Gordie Howe Bridge since 1979, met in Washington with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the New York Times reported. Less than a month before that meeting, Moroun had donated $1 million to a super political action committee supporting the president.

Trump’s early objections included a desire to punish Canada for what he described as its exploitation of the American economy and its renewed trade ties with China. He also falsely claimed that no American workers or steel had been used in the bridge’s construction.

Then Pete Hoekstra, the United States ambassador to Canada, indicated that the Trump administration was upset about the toll arrangement worked out by Canada and Michigan in 2012.

Canada bore the full cost of construction, and the bridge is jointly owned by Canada and Michigan. Under the original agreement, once tolls recover the construction costs, perhaps 50 years from now, the two governments would split any revenue not needed for maintenance and operations.

Hoekstra, who also falsely claimed that it was a “hoax” that Canada paid for the bridge, later suggested that the United States was looking for a way for Michigan to see revenue from the bridge sooner.

Under the new agreement, the Canadian official said, half of the tolls will go into a regional economic development fund for the first 15 years of operation. A U.S. official said the money will be collected by the United States government and the development fund will only be available to Americans. The United States will also have to approve toll increases beyond 10%, a U.S. official said. Previously, tolls were to be managed by an authority composed of representatives of Canada and Michigan.

Michigan’s government was initially cool to the federal intervention on tolls, though its position has since softened.

“It’s good for Michigan workers and it’s good for Michigan’s auto industry,” Stacey LaRouche, the press secretary for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, said in a statement last month. “This project has been a tremendous example of bipartisan and international cooperation.”

On Friday, Whitmer welcomed the end of the saga.

“The Gordie Howe International Bridge has always been a great deal for our state,” she said in a statement. “I’m proud to have fought for its opening and congratulate my partners who have worked on this issue alongside me for years.”

The Morouns, who made their fortune largely through trucking before expanding into real estate, have long been unpopular on both sides of the border. In Detroit, many of their decaying landmark properties became unwelcome symbols of the city’s struggles.

In Windsor, the Ambassador Bridge is a notoriously bad neighbor. At times, poor maintenance caused pieces of the bridge to crash to the ground. The bridge company further tarnished its reputation when it bought a swath of a neighborhood in preparation for its unfulfilled new bridge. The houses were boarded up and left to rot.

For a critical trade crossing, the Ambassador Bridge is oddly disconnected from expressways. The long lines of trucks traveling to and from it are forced into a gear-griding slog along a city road lined with traffic lights.

Fare hikes on the Ambassador Bridge have prompted large numbers of commercial drivers to detour and cross on a Canadian government-owned bridge about 100 miles to the north between Port Huron, Mich., and Sarnia, Ontario.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The Trump administration on Friday moved to open the habitats of imperiled animals to farming, drilling, mining, real estate development, and other activities in what environmentalists characterized as the most severe erosion of protections for wildlife in half a century.

It did so by recasting a single word: “harm.”

For more than 50 years, the federal government has used a broader definition of harm to animals under the Endangered Species Act, a bedrock environmental law. It included any significant “modification or degradation” of habitat that kills or injures animals by impairing their ability to eat, shelter, or breed.

The Supreme Court upheld this interpretation in 1995, ruling against property owners who argued that harm should only mean directly killing or injuring an endangered animal.

But on Friday, the Interior Department and the Commerce Department announced a final rule that rescinded this long-standing interpretation. Under the rule, destroying an endangered species’ nest or habitat would no longer be considered illegal.

The change could open the door for fossil fuel companies, agricultural interests, land developers, and others to disturb or destroy the habitats of vulnerable species. Many species are already running out of places to live, and the new rule is likely to add extreme pressure, experts said.

Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, said it planned a legal challenge. But if the case were to reach the current Supreme Court, its conservative supermajority could enshrine the change, preventing future administrations from reversing it, said Karrigan Börk, an environmental law professor at University of California Davis.

The move on Friday was the latest in a series of extraordinary efforts by the Trump administration to weaken environmental regulations designed to fight climate change and prevent species extinction. In March, a panel of administration officials voted to exempt oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from measures to protect endangered whales and other imperiled species.

In a news release, the Interior and Commerce departments said they were taking action to restore the Endangered Species Act to its original intent. They argued that in recent years, environmentalists and Democratic administrations had weaponized the act to block drilling and other development nationwide.

“For years, federal agencies abused the ESA to obstruct lawful land use and burden American families and businesses,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement. “That approach turned routine activity into a regulatory trap, drove up costs that impacted people’s lives, and expanded federal authority beyond what Congress intended.”

The National Mining Association, a trade association, applauded the announcement.

“Our industry is absolutely committed to the conservation and recovery of threatened and endangered species — and their habitats — but the definition of ‘harm’ has long been abused to serve as a punitive obstacle impeding critical projects,” Tawny Bridgeford, the group’s general counsel and senior vice president, said in a statement.

Legal scholars said the government was acting without conducting scientific research into the impact of the change, a step that would typically precede a move of this kind.

The change is “undermining the fundamental purpose of the Endangered Species Act,” said Lynn Scarlett, who served as deputy interior secretary under President George W. Bush.

Habitat modification or degradation caused by human activity is often the main reason that species face extinction. An intergovernmental body of leading scientists has found it to be the top driver of biodiversity loss worldwide.

Modifying habitats can easily harm individual animals without intentionally or immediately killing or injuring them, said Gary Frazer, who oversaw the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s endangered species program for two decades before retiring in 2025.

Piping plovers, for instance, need undisturbed beaches to nest and raise their young. They return to the same sites year after year but only occupy them in the spring and summer. During winter, when the birds have migrated south, a property owner could develop a beach without immediately hurting any individual piping plovers. But come spring, the returning plovers would find themselves without a place to feed, nest and raise their chicks.

Or take red-cockaded woodpeckers, which are not migratory but require mature pine trees to hollow out the cavities where extended families roost. Even if a timber company or developer cut down those trees without causing direct injury to any birds, they could not survive without other unoccupied old trees.

Amphibians like California tiger salamanders begin their lives in seasonal ponds but move into upland burrows after metamorphosis. If a pond were drained during the summer, the salamanders that returned to the spot would not have the water they need to produce the next generation.

“We are at the precipice of losing 50 years of progress in the protection of America’s wildlife, because we know that the challenges for most animals are not that they’re getting shot,” said Justin Pidot, a professor of environmental law at the University of Arizona who served as general counsel at the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Biden administration.

After the rule was proposed last year, it triggered roughly 220,000 public comments. About 99% were against the change, according to an analysis by the New York Times that used artificial intelligence.

Among those asking the administration to reconsider were state wildlife agencies in some Republican-governed states.

“Threatened and endangered species are entirely dependent on healthy habitats,” wrote Bruce Kreft, chief of the conservation and communications division of the North Dakota Game and Fish Department. The proposed change, he said, “would have dire consequences.”

Ted Will, who was the director of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Resources Division at the time, wrote that “the greatest threat to the vast majority of species of greatest conservation need in Georgia, whether federally listed or not, is habitat loss.”

Attorneys general from 16 states — including Arizona, California, Illinois, and New York — said the rationale for the change was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and contrary to law.”

Those supporting the change included industries affected by habitat restrictions. Oil and gas trade groups including the American Petroleum Institute wrote that harm must involve a direct injury to a particular animal.

But the vast majority of commenters appeared to be individuals, often begging the government to reconsider.

“Everyone knows a species cannot live without its habitat,” wrote Ashleigh Smith of Port Angeles, Wash.

Environmental lawyers and activists said that projects are rarely blocked because of habitat restrictions. More often, individuals or companies have to create “habitat conservation plans,” which describe the expected effects on endangered species and detail steps that will be taken to minimize them, they said.

With the change, people and governments will still need permits for actions that would, say, crush or bury endangered animals, but not for felling a tree or polluting a river that the animal relies on, said Jane Davenport, a senior attorney with Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group. That means landowners would take fewer measures to protect endangered species, and also contribute less to offsetting their actions by helping the species elsewhere.

“A lot of our endangered species are on the edge,” Börk said. “If you lose that species, it is gone.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The Trump administration issued subpoenas Friday to several journalists for the New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Donald Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.

The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in New York on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.

In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.

The Times denounced the administration’s actions.

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, the Times’ top newsroom lawyer, said in a statement Friday evening.

“Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used,” McCraw wrote. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

The subpoenas contain few specifics, asking only that the journalists testify “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” They were issued by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Clayton, who leads one of the country’s most prominent law enforcement offices, was recently nominated by Trump to serve as director of national intelligence.

Representatives for the White House and the U.S. attorney in Manhattan did not immediately respond to inquiries Friday evening.

The Times journalists who received subpoenas included Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt, who reported Wednesday that Trump had departed Turkey on the old Air Force One as a security precaution at the urging of the Secret Service. On Thursday, the Times reported that the new Air Force One, a Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, lacked some of the advanced security features of the older aircraft, including anti-missile capabilities. Both articles cited sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.

Before the Wednesday article was published, a senior official at the FBI contacted the Times to ask that the article be held, calling it an issue of national security, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The FBI official spoke with a reporter and a senior editor in the Times’ Washington bureau; the official declined to explain the security issue when asked. (A spokesperson for the Times, Charlie Stadtlander, confirmed the account.)

Trump has long been a harsh critic of the news media. But in his second term in office, he has moved aggressively to use the immense powers of the federal government in his efforts to attack the press.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department sought to compel testimony from journalists at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas after both news organizations fought back in sealed filings.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have initiated leak investigations into the disclosure of classified information. But subpoenas aimed at journalists are not common, and First Amendment advocates say they can chill the work of news gathering.

In January, FBI agents took the rare step of searching the home of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, as part of an investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material. The agents seized phones, laptops, and a smartwatch after executing a search warrant. Natanson had spent months speaking with government employees while reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce.

The Times is a party to several lawsuits involving Trump and his administration.

The president sued the Times last year, accusing it of defaming him, disparaging his reputation, and seeking to undermine his 2024 candidacy.

In December, the Times sued the Defense Department after it imposed restrictions on reporters who cover the military. The company sued again after the agency reduced reporters’ physical access to the Pentagon.

In May, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the Times, accusing it of employment discrimination. On Friday, the Times filed a counterclaim, saying the lawsuit was an act of retaliation for its coverage of the Trump presidency and a violation of its First Amendment rights.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

In a step toward mending one of the world’s most-followed family feuds, Prince Harry, his wife, Meghan, and their two children met for the first time in years with Harry’s father, King Charles III, and Queen Camilla, Buckingham Palace said on Friday.

The meeting answered questions that had been swirling all week about a potential reunion between the British king and his estranged second son. In 2020, Harry and his American-born wife, Meghan, renounced their royal titles and moved to the United States.

Friday’s visit was a sign of a detente between Harry and his father. Harry had not returned to Britain with his family since Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee in June 2022. Harry had visited his father in Britain by himself last fall.

The visit this week, officially to promote Harry’s charity competition for military veterans, had been shrouded in confusion, as efforts to mend family relations appeared to exacerbate them instead. Rifts emerged over where the family would stay and who would pay for their security.

The prince has been embroiled in a yearslong battle with British authorities since they ruled that he and Meghan, after stepping down from royal duties, no longer qualified for publicly financed protection in Britain.

Harry, 41, who arrived in Britain on Monday evening, lives in California with Meghan, 44, and their children, Archie and Lilibet. It was the first time in several years that Charles, 77, and his grandchildren, aged 7 and 5, met in person.

Buckingham Palace said there would be no images released of the family visit at Highgrove House, a country estate that is one of the king and queen’s residences.

Harry and his brother, William, had spent considerable time at Highgrove House, in the Cotswolds region west of London, when they were children. If offers a measure of privacy, far from the eyes of the London-based press corps. Earlier in the week, Harry’s team said that Meghan and the couple’s children, who were originally planning to accompany Harry for the whole visit, would not be going to London, citing security concerns.

Highgrove House is also located nearer to Birmingham, where Harry had taken part earlier on Friday in an event to begin a countdown to the Invictus Games, a competition he founded for wounded veterans, which is due to be held in Birmingham in 2027. He played pickleball, took part in wheelchair rugby, and gave an interview to a British news outlet, speaking glowingly of his wife and children.

The meeting with his father was a decidedly more private affair. The palace confirmed the meeting only after it had taken place.

The reunion came shortly after a judge in Britain ruled against Harry and other celebrities earlier this week in a lawsuit that accused the publisher of the Daily Mail of targeting them with unlawful information gathering.

The prince’s legal battles against the tabloid press marked a departure from the royal family’s tradition of ignoring unfavorable press coverage. Harry and Meghan have been open about their differences with the rest of the family, including in an Oprah interview, a tell-all memoir, and a documentary, even as they repeatedly voiced a need for privacy.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.