Category: National Politics

Two Republican senators on Monday released the first in a trove of text messages from Anthony S. Fauci’s former government cell phone, including a discussion with health officials about whether the COVID vaccine posed a risk for pregnant women.

The messages were released by Sens. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) and Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who lead panels investigating Fauci, the longtime infectious-disease scientist who left government at the end of 2022 after becoming a highly visible official helping lead the pandemic response.

The texts appear to show an exchange between Fauci and top health officials in January 2021 related to the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine for pregnant women.

In one message, according to screenshots the senators released, Fauci wrote: “Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose. this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

“Definitely a good point, esp after dose two,” then-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky responded.

In a news release, the senators pointed to several subsequent public statements from Fauci and other administration officials in which they said the benefits of pregnant women getting vaccinated appeared to outweigh the risks.

In February 2021, for instance, Fauci said the Food and Drug Administration has “found, thus far — and we’ve got to be careful — but thus far, no red flags about that, about pregnant women.”

Some of the statements cited by Johnson and Paul occurred after the CDC officially recommended pregnant women get the vaccine in August 2021, citing an agency analysis that found no increase in miscarriage in pregnant women.

In a statement, Johnson said the release of the texts “could have an immediate impact on public health.” He added that “you don’t wait a day, months, or years, to inform the public of potential dangers.”

The CDC states that with more than a million pregnant women vaccinated globally, studies have not shown increased risk for complications like miscarriage, preterm delivery, and more. Health officials have said such past exchanges reflect the evolving nature of the science and debate at the time.

Fauci declined to comment on the released messages. Walensky and Vivek H. Murthy, at the time a member of President Joe Biden’s COVID advisory board who was also included in the texts, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pregnant women are historically excluded from clinical trials, including those for the coronavirus vaccine. But it became clear that contracting the virus during pregnancy could be associated with increased risk of preterm birth and other adverse outcomes, and so health officials concluded that the benefits of vaccination appeared to outweigh the risks, according to a former public health official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

The senators said the texts are among more than 34,000 recovered from a copy of Fauci’s former iPhone. It also contains 522 voicemails, they said. The phone was obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services, now led by fellow Fauci critics, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Now that we have the documents and Fauci’s government-issued phone, my investigation has only just begun,” Johnson, the chairperson of the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, wrote Monday on social media.

As part of Paul’s investigation of Fauci, HHS also turned over years of Fauci’s personal diary entries that were collected from government servers.

Last week, a Senate committee that Paul chairs voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he declined to answer its questions and accused Paul of trying to wrongly entrap him. The Justice Department, which is not obligated to prosecute Fauci, said it received Paul’s letter referring the matter but did not confirm whether it planned to pursue any criminal charges.

In April 2021, a New England Journal of Medicine article written by CDC officials stated that preliminary findings “did not show obvious safety signals” among pregnant women who received the vaccines — meaning there wasn’t an unusual number of adverse events — but added that more follow-up was needed.

“Our societies [American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine] were strongly recommending and advocating for pregnant women to have access to COVID vaccines in the earliest stages of the pandemic because those of us who were dealing withCOVID in pregnancy were seeing exceptionally high rates of complications,” said Neil S. Silverman, a member of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine’s Infectious Disease and Emerging Threats Committee and maternal-fetal medicine faculty at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Fauci has faced numerous legal threats from Republicans, including Paul and Johnson, who accuse him of covering up his agency’s funding of risky coronavirus research in Wuhan, China, before the virus was first detected there. Fauci has dismissed those claims as “preposterous.”

Kennedy, his allies, and some Republicans in Congress have expressed concerns about vaccine safety.

Kennedy, the founder of a prominent anti-vaccine group, has been an outspoken critic of mRNA-based shots, and once called the coronavirus shots “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Medical experts say COVID-19 vaccines are effective at protecting people from getting seriously ill, being hospitalized, and dying.

Last year, Kennedy sought to no longer recommend the coronavirus vaccine for healthy pregnant women. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said it was “concerned” and “extremely disappointed” by the move, and the medical society has continued to recommend the shot for pregnant women.

On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that called for cutting the number of recommended childhood vaccines, spacing out those shots and making other changes that would upend decades of federal guidance on vaccines for children.

Speaking in the Oval Office, the president reiterated his long-held claim that childhood vaccines have led to a rise in U.S. autism cases, an idea that outside researchers have largely debunked.

The final stretch of primary season has scrambled the battle for Congress, as scandals, insurgent victories, and voters’ rejection of party leaders’ preferred candidates reshape a small but critical set of races.

Democrats’ path to a Senate majority narrowed with the triumph of progressive insurgent Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, whom polls show faring worse against former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) than his primary rival. Republicans suffered their own setbacks as a Trump-endorsed congressional candidate in Michigan lost to a rival who had suspended his campaign, while misconduct allegations drove a vulnerable North Carolina incumbent from the race.

Republicans are eager to face several Democrats they believe are too far left for their districts, while Democrats see new openings where GOP candidates have suffered from controversies. With control of Congress potentially turning on a handful of seats, both parties are betting individual candidates will matter as much as the political terrain — though operatives’ judgments about electability often prove wrong.

“It’s really hard to tell you what the board’s going to be like,” said Democratic strategist Andrew Acosta, noting that antiestablishment fervor among grassroots organizers has made prognosticating harder for consultants and pollsters, and scandals are adding more volatility.

For Trump, the stakes include the fate of his policy agenda for the rest of his term, as well as burdensome oversight and possibly a third impeachment. But he has taken a hands-off approach to the midterms, frustrating some Republicans who want him to help mobilize his supporters and dip into his super PAC’s $400 million war chest.

“I said to somebody, ‘Wait a minute, you don’t understand — I won, I’m not campaigning,’” Trump said in an interview with Punchbowl News released Friday. “If I don’t run, will those people go out and vote? … Because a lot of them are very angry at Republicans.”

Senate candidates scramble the usual map

To win the Senate, Democrats need to defend their seats in Michigan and Georgia, pick up North Carolina and Maine, plus win in two more states that Trump won by more than 10 points in 2024 — a tall order even in a year expected to favor them.

The latest polls show how individual candidates can defy a state’s typical partisan makeup. Democrats are currently leading in red states like Ohio, Iowa, and Texas by more than in left-leaning Michigan or Maine.

Without Michigan, Democrats would have to win in a third state that Trump won by at least 10 points in 2024. Polls showed Rep. Haley Stevens (D., Mich.), who was endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), faring at least slightly better against Rogers than El-Sayed. But he edged her out in Tuesday’s primary by about one percentage point.

“There’s a serious distinction, a big difference between somebody like Haley Stevens, who has far-left positions — and we would hammer her every day and litigate those positions — and somebody like Abdul,” said Alex Latcham, who runs Senate Leadership Fund, the flagship Republican super PAC in Senate races.

Schumer, who spoke to El-Sayed on Wednesday, said in an interview that he was confident Democrats would hold Michigan. No Republican has won a Senate race there in more than three decades, and Trump is not popular there.

El-Sayed just needs to “keep talking about jobs, talking about lower costs, talking about corruption — the same things that our candidates talk about across the country,” Schumer said.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton beat incumbent Sen. John Cornyn over the objection of GOP leaders and now trails Democratic state Rep. James Talarico in most polls.

In Maine, establishment favorite Gov. Janet Mills stalled out against Graham Platner, who later withdrew amid sexual assault allegations. The Democrats’ new nominee, Troy Jackson, is in a tight race against five-term incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R).

Republicans had already largely written off Georgia after no formidable challenger to Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) emerged. Their nominee, Rep. Mike Collins, trailed by 13 points in a Fox News poll conducted in late June and came under further pressure after CNN reported that his live-in son-in-law shared white supremacist and neo-Nazi content online.

Collins disavowed those views but did not distance himself from his son-in-law. The campaign argued the race remains competitive by pointing to $60 million commitments from outside groups to help Collins.

“Political ‘experts’ and the news media were laughingly wrong — just this week — about the competitiveness of the Senate primary in Michigan,” Collins spokesperson Corbin Keown said. “Mike Collins will beat Jon Ossoff in November, and the media will once again be left wondering how they got it so wrong.”

The primary calendar could still reshape another Senate race. Alaska generally votes Republican, but Sen. Dan Sullivan faces a competitive race against former Rep. Mary Peltola (D), so Republicans are hoping a second candidate named Dan Sullivan does not make the top four and advance to the November ballot, where he could confuse voters and siphon off votes from the incumbent.

House primaries create openings for both parties

While midterms are historically tough on the sitting president’s party, Republicans moved the House map in their favor by gerrymandering additional states to eliminate blue seats and narrow the competitive field to only a couple of dozen districts. Democrats are hoping Trump’s unpopularity can push them deeper into red territory.

The Senate result in Michigan immediately spilled into House races. Trump and other Republicans immediately moved to cast El-Sayed as a new party standard-bearer, seeking to make his progressive positions a drag on the entire Democratic ticket.

“Michigan Democrats proved that their party has been completely taken over by the radical socialist left,” Rep. Bill Huizenga (R., Mich.) said in response to Tuesday’s results, linking El-Sayed with his own Democratic challenger, Sean McCann.

The controversy around El-Sayed may have also hurt the Trump-endorsed candidate in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, Amir Hassan. Republican operatives said voters may have confused him with controversial podcaster Hasan Piker, who campaigned with El-Sayed.

Hassan lost Tuesday’s primary to another Republican named Tom Smith who raised almost no money and suspended his campaign last month. In lieu of a campaign finance report, he sent the Federal Election Commission a handwritten letter.

Smith acknowledged his race got far less attention than the Senate contest and said his win surprised him too. In a statement Friday, he echoed national GOP attacks on left-leaning candidates, saying he and Trump-aligned Michigan Republicans would be a foil to the “failed socialist policies” of progressives like El-Sayed.

Incumbent Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet’s (D) campaign manager, Bobby Bennett, said the campaign didn’t see either Republican as harder to run against. The Cook Political Report rates the race as leaning Democratic.

Voters also rejected Trump’s endorsement in Tennessee by ousting incumbent Rep. Andy Ogles. Still, national Republicans did not rue his roughly six-point loss to Charlie Hatcher on Thursday, since Ogles had faced ethics investigations and raised less money than Democrat Chaz Molder. Ogles lost much of his incumbency advantage when Republican-led redistricting replaced about 80% of the district’s voters as part of an effort to eliminate a Democratic-held Black-majority seat.

Trump endorsed Hatcher on Friday, saying he had stuck with Ogles “even though he had virtually no chance of winning.”

Elsewhere, both parties seized on primary results they argued had strengthened their prospects in competitive House races. Republicans cheered when national Democrats lost their preferred candidates in California’s 22nd District, where Bernie Sanders-endorsed Randy Villegas will take on incumbent Rep. David G. Valadao, and Arizona’s 1st District, where failed 2024 nominee Amish Shah beat ex-Republican Marlene Galán-Woods to take on Trump-endorsed Jay Feely.

Democrats also acknowledged a tougher road against Rep. Tom Barrett (R., Mich.) with their nomination of William Lawrence, a progressive activist who co-founded the Sunrise Movement. “Even Democrats admit that Socialist William Lawrence is too extreme for Mid-Michigan and that he will be rejected this fall,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Zach Bannon said Thursday.

A few consequential House primaries remain. In Florida’s primary on Aug. 18, some House Republicans are backing a challenger to Rep. Cory Mills (R), whom they view as unusually vulnerable amid a House Ethics investigation and assault allegation.

Democrats see several Republican-held seats becoming more competitive because of scandals or candidate vulnerabilities. Rep. Max Miller (R., Ohio) faces pressure to resign over domestic abuse allegations, and Rep. Chuck Edwards (R., N.C.) dropped his reelection bid after the Ethics Committee found inappropriate conduct toward female staff. Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R., N.J.), also drew criticism for missing almost four months of votes while struggling with depression. Cook rates Kean’s race a toss-up.

Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R., Pa.), running in another toss-up district, is facing scrutiny over extensive stock trading after campaigning on banning the practice among lawmakers. Democrats are also bullish about flipping Texas’s 23rd District after Tony Gonzales admitted to an affair and resigned. The replacement Republican nominee, Brandon Herrera, known on YouTube as “The AK Guy,” faces San Antonio attorney Katy Padilla Stout.

The odds of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Ohio) hanging onto her seat, after Republicans redrew her district to favor them, improved in Democrats’ eyes when the GOP nomination went to former state Rep. Derek Merrin, whom she beat in 2024.

Staffers of candidates who defeated national Democrats’ preferred contenders dismissed electability concerns and pointed to the quick postelection support of the party’s House campaign arm, a typical practice. In Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, state Auditor Matthew Dunlap defeated state Sen. Joe Baldacci, whom the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had included in its “Red to Blue” program. Since the primary, Dunlap’s campaign has built working relationships with the national group, spokesperson Matt Herdman said.

“It’s going to be a difficult race, everyone knows that, but we feel like we’re on a good path,” Herdman said.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) said Friday that he will vote to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, giving President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department the last expected vote he needs to be approved by the full Senate.

Cassidy made the announcement on the Senate floor just hours after Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, another critical GOP vote, said she would oppose Blanche’s nomination. Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine) announced earlier this week that she would also be voting no.

But with Cassidy’s support now in hand, the Senate’s Republican leadership is expected to move forward with a vote on Blanche’s confirmation as soon as Friday after weeks in which the acting attorney general’s prospects appeared to be in doubt.

With all Democrats expected to oppose Blanche and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) absent for health reasons, a no vote by Cassidy would at minimum have forced an embarrassing delay in the full Senate’s confirmation vote.

Cassidy said Friday he shared concerns raised by Murkowski and Collins over the “politicization” of the Justice Department under Trump and the controversial deal Blanche oversaw this spring to settle Trump’s claims against the IRS, which included a now-scuttled plan for a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claim they were victims of political prosecutions.

But the senator couched his decision to back Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal defense lawyer, as a choice between the current nominee and the prospect that Trump could pick someone worse.

“Mr. Blanche is not perfect, and he will tell you this, but the choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche,” Cassidy said. “It is between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department effectively under President Trump and who, indeed may not be as good as Mr. Blanche.”

He added: “I’ll be criticized for this vote. What’s new?”

The fact that Blanche’s nomination was in doubt at all early Friday and hinging on Cassidy’s vote underscored the growing unease that has emerged in some corners of the president’s party over the Justice Department’s direction.

It also highlighted the extent to which Trump’s attacks on GOP lawmakers whom he deems insufficiently loyal have prompted an increased willingness among Republicans to buck his demands.

Cassidy lost his bid for reelection this year after Trump backed his GOP primary rival, Rep. Julia Letlow (R., La.). He has repeatedly criticized the president since then and threatened to vote against administration priorities.

“I have a history with Mr. Trump, but that history does not matter one bit,” Cassidy said Friday in explaining his vote on Blanche.

The senator said he came to his decision after weeks of conversation with Blanche and current and former Justice Department officials, including former attorney general William P. Barr. Barr resigned late in Trump’s first term amid disagreements over the president’s false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.

Barr, Cassidy said, advised him to back Blanche’s nomination, suggesting that as the lawyer who guided Trump through the criminal prosecutions he faced during his years out of office, Blanche had established a unique trust with the president, which could enable him to talk Trump out of bad decisions.

“I am realistic that President Trump can be unrelenting,” Cassidy said. “This will be true no matter who the attorney general is. And this is the rationale for having a Senate-confirmed attorney general with more leverage to push back.”

Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has eroded the Justice Department’s long-standing tradition of independence while demanding it pursue prosecutions of his political enemies and reward his political allies.

Blanche has overseen many of those efforts serving first as the No. 2 official under then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and then as the department’s acting head after Trump fired Bondi in April. He has defended the president’s “right” to interfere with criminal investigations and his controversial pardons of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Democrats have decried Blanche as a uniquely dangerous nominee who thus far has proved unable or unwilling to talk the president out of decisions that run contrary to the rule of law. As his confirmation battle has worn on, more and more Republicans have expressed similar concerns.

Earlier this week, Sens. John Cornyn (R., Texas) and Thom Tillis (R., N.C.), two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had threatened to kill Blanche’s nomination in committee over reservations they harbored about the out-of-court deal Blanche oversaw to resolve Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns to the media.

In addition to the taxpayer-backed payout fund, the deal also provided unusual tax protections to Trump, two of his sons, and their businesses, shielding them from any preexisting tax audits.

The fund proposal drew immediate bipartisan backlash with Democrats deriding it as a “slush fund” designed to reward Trump’s allies, forcing Blanche to walk back the proposal days after its announcement.

But Cornyn and Tillis, who are leaving the Senate after this year after tangling with Trump, demanded written assurances from Blanche that the president would not later reverse that decision before they agreed to support him.

Blanche ultimately relented, issuing statements late Sunday declaring the fund officially dead and clarifying that the deal’s tax provisions protected the Trumps only from past tax audits and would not prevent the IRS from reviewing their finances in the future.

But critics have questioned whether Blanche’s written pledges hold any legal weight, given they weren’t also signed by Trump and his legal team, and could be ignored by the president at any point.

Murkowski raised that possibility in her statement announcing her decision to vote against Blanche’s nomination Friday. The only reason the payout fund was now off the table, she said, was because Blanche needed Senate support for his nomination.

“Once we vote, that will end, and there is no telling what the future holds,” she said, adding later: “The country needs an attorney general who will check the worst impulses of this administration. I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that, if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.”

Despite pledging his support for Blanche, Cassidy echoed Murkowski’s concerns. He said Blanche showed “poor judgment” in signing off on Trump’s IRS deal and added that he was “particularly concerned about episodes of apparent lawfare — DOJ bringing suits against political enemies.”

The Justice Department has, at the president’s demand, launched probes of critics including former FBI director James B. Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), former CIA director John Brennan, ex-White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, and Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video this year calling on military service members to resist illegal orders.

“A never-ending cycle of prosecuting political enemies undermines the rule of law, degrades the public’s trust in our institutions, and makes our politics more extreme when we need to unite to solve the big problems of our time,” Cassidy said.