Category: New York Times

In 2019, Kash Patel, then a White House aide, objected to how news outlets portrayed his role in President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. “It’s time that I began fighting back,” Patel said at the time. He sued Politico, the New York Times, and CNN.

In 2023, Patel, then a roving pro-Trump commentator, took offense at the work of a blogger who had bashed his record and called him a “chud,” a derogatory term progressives use to describe MAGA followers. He sued the blogger, Jim Stewartson, for $10 million in damages.

And in April, Patel, now the director of the FBI, seethed over an article in the Atlantic that reported alarm among some colleagues over his “erratic” behavior and alleged heavy drinking. He soon sued the publication, demanding $250 million in damages.

Patel has yet to reach a settlement or a favorable jury verdict in the cases. Each of the news organizations he has sued has defended its journalism and said it was protected by the First Amendment.

But the strategy is a familiar one. Trump, the man who appointed Patel to lead the FBI, has long turned to the courts when faced with unfavorable press coverage. And perhaps no one in his two administrations has followed his lead as closely as Patel, who has filed at least six defamation lawsuits against news media companies and commentators in nearly seven years.

In some of the cases, Patel filed strongly worded complaints only to allow them to languish in the ups and downs of civil litigation — a trajectory that some legal experts said raised questions about his objectives.

“The goals here,” said Sonja R. West, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, “appear to be to muddy the narrative, run up opponents’ legal bills, and send a message to journalists that if you cover us critically, it’s going to cost you a lot of time and money.”

Jesse R. Binnall, a lawyer in Virginia who represents Patel, said in an email, “Director Patel pursues these cases to win them — and anyone who thinks he would tolerate anything less than aggressive, expeditious accountability simply doesn’t know the man.” He added that the number of defamation lawsuits filed by Patel is a “direct reflection of the volume of lies published” about him.

The suits constitute another front on which news organizations have been forced to spend time and money to defend their work in the Trump era. Others include steady public criticism from top officials, including Trump; limitations on access to the White House and the Pentagon; leak investigations that ensnare national security reporters; and investigations by the Federal Communications Commission.

Exact numbers on public officials who file defamation claims are hard to come by, said Michael Norwick, a lawyer at the Media Law Resource Center, a group that assists news organizations. Even so, Norwick, who has worked at the center for 15 years, said, “I don’t remember this being a thing, and now it’s a thing.”

RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, said via email that there were examples of defamation suits from officials who had completed their time in public service, but that she was unaware of cases predating Trump in which officials had wielded “law enforcement or other executive-leverage power that they can couple with the pressure of the suit.”

Andersen Jones said the suits against news media companies had forced her to remove a line she had used in lectures for her entire career, which had said top government officials, including the president, do not sue for libel.

An FBI spokesperson said that even government officials should have recourse to address what they deemed to be malicious lies in the news media.

Patel and Binnall face an uphill battle in court. To recover damages in a defamation suit against a news organization, a public official like Patel would have to prove not only that the journalists had published a damaging falsehood, but also that they had done so knowingly or with reckless disregard of the truth — a legal standard known as actual malice.

When Patel sued the Times in 2019 over its coverage of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, his complaint contained about 750 words of biography. He called himself a “brilliant attorney, trusted adviser, staunch proponent and defender of the rule of law”; and he demanded nearly $45 million in damages, along with “prejudgment interest” and “postjudgment interest” at 6% per year.

After all that buildup, Patel failed to serve court papers to the Times and later dropped the case.

A similar situation unfolded after Patel sued Politico for what he argued were “malicious efforts” to destroy his career through its coverage of Trump’s interactions with Ukraine. Politico moved to dismiss the case after Patel did not serve the company with court documents for more than a year, leading to a “reasonable presumption that he had abandoned his claims,” according to a court filing.

Patel dropped that suit but filed a new one, which is still active. (His suits against the Times, Politico, and CNN were filed by his previous counsel, not by Binnall’s firm.)

And Patel drew a rebuke from a federal judge in Nevada for failing to pursue his case against Stewartson, the blogger, for more than a year, a gap that Binnall, in an email to the Times, attributed to a careful and deliberate legal strategy. The litigation is ongoing.

In his public statements, Patel is prone to sweeping condemnations of news organizations. Traces of that language surface in his lawsuits. His complaint against CNN, for instance, included claims of a “brutal attack on Kash’s reputation” and a “continuation of past smear campaigns to discredit Kash.”

It also said CNN had defamed Patel by reporting that he “worked to discredit” special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — an odd claim from a man who would go on to characterize that investigation in a book as a “taxpayer-funded hit job from a group of government gangsters.” He abandoned his claims related to the matter during an appeals court hearing.

In affirming the dismissal of Patel’s 2020 suit against CNN, a Virginia appeals court found that his claims were “conclusory and not binding” and fell short of actual malice. It also awarded CNN $150 in damages. The network declined to comment on whether Patel had paid.

The Supreme Court declared in 1964 that public debate may feature “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks” on government officials, as Patel is now learning.

In April, a federal judge in Texas dismissed a lawsuit filed by Patel against Frank Figliuzzi, a retired FBI official and TV commentator who had knocked Patel’s work habits last year on the MS NOW program Morning Joe, saying the FBI director was “far more” visible at nightclubs than at the agency’s headquarters. The judge dismissed the suit on the grounds that Figliuzzi’s remark amounted to “rhetorical hyperbole that cannot constitute defamation.”

In an email, Binnall said, “Although we agree that Mr. Figliuzzi is not a serious person, the notion that the more you exaggerate a lie, the more legally protected you become, is not a coherent reading of the law.” Patel is appealing the ruling.

Stewartson, the blogger, also stood by the insults that he had slung at Patel on social media. “I thought it was hysterical that he put that in there,” Stewartson said in an interview, referring to Patel’s references to being called a “chud.” “Because how do you prove he’s not a chud?”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — The feud between Anthropic and the Trump administration escalated again Saturday after the government took the unusual step a day earlier of demanding that the artificial intelligence company cut off foreign access to its latest models, as top officials suggested the dispute was unlikely to resolve quickly.

Late on Friday, Anthropic disclosed in a blog post that it had disabled access for all customers to its most advanced AI systems, known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after receiving a directive from the administration to suspend access to any foreign national. The move shocked former U.S. officials and cybersecurity experts, many of whom questioned the validity of the action and noted that it diverged from the hands-off approach to policing the booming AI industry that President Donald Trump had endorsed earlier this month.

Anthropic said the directive did not explain the national security concerns that prompted it. But the company added that the government had said that it became aware of a method to “jailbreak,” or bypass, security restrictions on Fable 5 intended to limit a customer’s ability to abuse the product for hacking or other potential harms. Anthropic countered that the fears about the jailbreak method were overblown.

The announcement inflamed tensions between the Trump administration and Anthropic, which earlier this month confidentially filed for an initial public offering following a funding round valuing it at nearly $1 trillion. The two sides have sparred for months over how Anthropic’s AI systems could be used in military and intelligence settings, culminating with the Pentagon labeling the company a supply-chain risk.

On Saturday, top Trump administration officials and allies of Trump’s stepped up their attacks on Anthropic.

“Three months ago, @DeptofWar kicked @AnthropicAI out of our building — forever,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on the social platform X. “Every passing day proves why that was the right move.”

David Sacks, a venture capitalist who until recently worked in the administration as an AI czar, accused Anthropic in a lengthy social media post Saturday of being reckless with the release of its latest model, dubbed Fable 5.

Sacks, who said he had spoken to many people inside and outside the administration about the directive, said the administration had asked Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, to fix the jailbreak issue after a “highly credible trusted partner” of Anthropic’s and the government’s came forward with research.

“Dario refused,” Sacks said.

A person briefed on Amodei’s conversations disputed the account, saying that Anthropic was happy to discuss the concerns.

Sacks did not name the “trusted partner” he referred to in his post. But multiple technology firms, including Amazon, spoke with the White House about the security issues, according to people familiar with the matter. Several of the people said a message from Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, detailing security issues was the most influential, raising concerns about the capabilities of the new Anthropic model.

But several of these officials said a separate document from Amazon explaining the security concerns with Anthropic’s model was misleading. The concerning capabilities that the document highlighted with Anthropic’s model are also present in OpenAI’s top model, 5.5.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the exact nature of its discussions with the White House. “It’s not uncommon for governments to seek our counsel on potential security risks,” the spokesperson said. “When they occur, we don’t share the details of these discussions.”

Administration officials called Anthropic officials at 1:15 p.m. Friday and gave them 90 minutes to pull their most advanced models down, citing an undefined national security concern, according to people briefed on the discussions. Anthropic officials asked for more information and worked to learn what the precise concern was, since the Commerce Department’s review and testing of Fable did not reveal significant concerns.

Then, at 5:21 p.m., Anthropic was notified that the Trump administration was imposing export controls that effectively forced the company to pull down its model, which consumers had just begun to have access to.

Discussions about resolving the dispute are continuing. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, spoke to Anthropic officials Friday, and was set to have another session with senior company officials Saturday evening, according to people briefed on the discussions and plans.

Some experts said the Trump administration was either misunderstanding or deliberately misconstruing what transpired. Katie Moussouris, the CEO of Luta Security, said on social media that she had seen the research paper that prompted the administration’s actions.

“It’s not a jailbreak,” she said, but rather a defensive maneuver designed to limit the misuse of a model. “If national defense is the goal, this is an own goal.”

Earlier this month, the Trump administration issued an executive order that asked technology companies to voluntarily let the government review their new models before releasing them to the public. But it did not give the government an official role in approving their release.

The order had been delayed after a fierce debate in which AI companies — and some sympathetic government officials — had pushed back against the government interfering in model deployment. The dispute came on the heels of Anthropic’s very limited release of Mythos, an AI model so good at discovering and weaponizing new cybersecurity vulnerabilities that it sparked widespread concerns about its potential to wreak havoc.

The new restrictions on Anthropic have raised questions about the implications for other AI models that may have similar capabilities. Former officials and technology experts said the administration did not appear to have thought through the longer-term ramifications of such a move.

But the measure could be limited to Anthropic, which received a fusillade of attacks from the administration in recent months.

In February, amid the Pentagon’s clash with Anthropic, Trump called the company a “radical left, woke company” and “Leftwing nut jobs” working to dictate how the government wins and fights wars.

“I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology,” the president wrote on social media. “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!”

Some administration officials have in recent weeks been looking for an off-ramp in the dispute, U.S. officials say. White House and intelligence officials have pushed forward a classified contract between Anthropic and the National Security Agency, which would allow the spy agency to use the company’s technology for a variety of purposes, including intelligence analysis and detecting new computer vulnerabilities.

Officials at the NSA, which is responsible for digital eavesdropping and government cybersecurity, were not involved in Friday’s decision, according to people familiar with the matter.

Many U.S. officials said the new technology Anthropic had developed was too important to national security to allow the dispute with the Pentagon to block cooperation. But inside the top ranks of the Pentagon, officials remain upset with the company, insisting that the firm sign on to the same contractual provisions that other AI companies have embraced.

In a June 12 letter viewed by the New York Times, Lutnick told Amodei that a special license would be required for the company to distribute its Mythos and Fable 5 models “to all destinations worldwide,” as well as to share them with non-U.S. citizens.

“Failure to comply will result in prompt criminal and civil penalties, as provided for by law,” Lutnick wrote.

The government has controlled AI models before, but past restrictions were more targeted. A measure introduced early last year by the Biden administration placed restrictions on companies’ ability to export the so-called weights for specific AI models — the proprietary numerical values that tell the model how much importance to place on different pieces of data.

The measure taken by the Trump administration goes far beyond that, by barring Anthropic from sharing the model with any foreign country or any foreign national without first obtaining a license.

The restrictions on the involvement of foreign nationals, even those with green cards, could be particularly chilling in an industry that relies on foreign talent. In the past, government officials have often reserved that type of restriction for the most sensitive technologies, like weapons systems.

Chris McGuire, a former Biden administration technology official who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the administration’s current policy is that AI chips can be exported to China, but Canadian green card holders in the United States cannot access leading U.S. models.

“That’s absurd,” he added.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

SEATTLE — The revolution begins with a poetry reading.

Last month, a journalist turned organizer named Andrew Engelson invited friends and fellow Pacific Northwesterners to a small club in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood for an evening of verse, in which his guests would ponder what it means to be from “Cascadia,” the bioregion stretching from Northern California, through Oregon and Washington, into British Columbia.

Odes to volcanoes, woods, and rivers would help the audience reach the same conclusion he has: The region might be better off leaving the United States.

Engelson and his group, Cascadia Democratic Action, are trying to drive conversations that could lead to 2028 ballot measures in Washington and Oregon on secession if things don’t improve. The effort is hardly an outlier in these Disunited States, where frustration on the left and right has created small but vocal collections of Americans so fed up with feeling disempowered that they’re talking about redrawing state lines or dissolving them altogether.

“The salmon don’t pay attention to the 49th parallel,” Engelson said, referring to the U.S.-Canada border. “I have way more in common with someone in Vancouver, B.C., than someone in Arkansas.”

Separatism is “in the zeitgeist,” said Ryan Griffiths, a Syracuse University political scientist who wrote the 2025 book The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work.

Activists in Texas and California continue to push independence. Lawmakers in inland California have pitched splitting the state in two or three. Organizers in southeastern New Mexico want to join Texas.

Republican lawmakers in Indiana approved legislation last year inviting conservative counties in Illinois to become Hoosiers. A state senator in West Virginia followed suit in late 2025, inviting 30 border counties from Virginia and Maryland to join the Mountaineers.

North of the 49th parallel, conservative Alberta is moving toward a referendum in October asking: Do you want to stay in Canada or have a separate, binding referendum to secede?

The people Griffiths interviews often sound remarkably similar, he said.

“Whether they’re libertarian or conservative or liberal,” he said, they complain that government is “in their face, it’s dysfunctional, and it’s distant.”

One of the most successful of those efforts is, like Engelson’s, based in the Northwest, but on the opposite end of the political spectrum. The Greater Idaho movement, a 6-year-old campaign to move a large swath of rural, conservative Oregon into neighboring Idaho, has won support in 13 county ballot measures and turned a once-fringe idea into a subject of state capital debate.

“Our system is not quite functioning the way it’s supposed to,” said Matt McCaw, a spokesperson for Greater Idaho.

Greater Idaho proponents argue that their movement reflects frustrations that date to Oregon’s earliest days. At the 1857 meeting to draft Oregon’s founding document, 59 of the 60 delegates came from west of the Cascade Mountains.

Today, eastern Oregon makes up roughly two-thirds of the state’s land mass but only 10% to 15% of its population. Lawmakers from Portland and the Interstate 5 corridor dominate policy debates and have pushed through gun laws, environmental regulations, and tax changes that many in rural Oregon oppose.

As western Oregon transitioned from an economy built on timber, farming, and manufacturing to one driven by technology and services, the disconnect has grown.

“They just don’t understand us on the other side of the mountains,” said Dan Joyce, the county judge in Malheur County, Ore., whose voters were among the earliest and strongest supporters of Greater Idaho.

Semir Dzebo, a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford University who worked on a 2025 study on Greater Idaho, said public polling conducted through the study showed that the effort was less a partisan fight than an economic one.

In other parts of the world, efforts to redraw boundaries are often rooted in long-standing ethnic, linguistic, or national identities tied to particular places, such as Scotland in the United Kingdom or Catalonia in Spain. Since the Civil War, America has felt “inoculated” against separatist movements, Dzebo said, “because it rests on a civic understanding of nationalism, that there’s no particular ethnicity that is ‘American.’”

But as electoral politics have become more polarized, and as the gap between the rich and everyone else has grown, the sense of a shared American identity has eroded.

“What propels these movements is when that sense of feeling different really comes with economic consequences,” Dzebo said.

In that regard, the Greater Idaho movement and the Cascadia secession effort are cousins. McCaw doesn’t think elected leaders in the Oregon capital represent him. Engelson feels the same about Washington, D.C.

Cascadians argue that people are often bound more closely by geography, ecology, and regional economies than by national borders, particularly when the borders stretch so far in every direction. Engelson said Washington and Oregon progressives could get more value from their tax dollars if they formed their own smaller political unit and paid for priorities such as universal healthcare and free college tuition.

A number of states are already engaging in a form of “soft secession,” by conducting multistate public health efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic or forming compacts to address climate change.

But none of the secessionist movements are close to achieving their goals.

The Constitution provides a mechanism for changing state boundaries with the approval of legislatures in both affected states and Congress. But that tends to go only one direction. Neither Virginia nor Illinois has responded to the overtures of its neighbors.

Oregon Democrats have declined to meet with proponents of Greater Idaho, and neither President Donald Trump nor Oregon’s lone Republican Congress member, Cliff Bentz, has answered calls for help. And voters in two of the counties that initially embraced the idea have since backtracked.

The Cascadia movement faces an even larger obstacle. In the 1869 case Texas v. White, the Supreme Court ruled that the nation was “indestructible” and that states could not unilaterally secede. The court left open the possibility that a state could leave through “revolution” or with the consent of the other states but rejected the idea that a state could simply vote its way out.

Hugh Spitzer, a retired University of Washington law professor who began studying separatist movements in law school, laid out a possible path through a treaty negotiated by the president and ratified by two-thirds of the Senate. But that would take decades and require momentum driven by more than a single political moment.

Engelson said the second Trump administration had convinced him that conversations about separation could no longer remain theoretical.

“We’re in an abusive relationship with the federal government,” he said. “Divorce is a valid response.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Friday that it would comply with a court order to restart processing asylum and other immigration applications filed by a broad swath of people who had been left in legal limbo for months.

The move comes after a federal judge in Rhode Island last week struck down a suite of policies imposed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a major blow to the administration’s expanding efforts to restrict legal immigration. The policies included a global hold on asylum applications filed with the agency and a freeze on immigration applications filed by people from 39 countries, largely in Africa and the Middle East, that are subject to President Donald Trump’s travel ban.

More than 1 million applications had ground to a halt as a result, preventing many people from obtaining green cards, citizenship, and other immigration benefits. The halt also disrupted people’s ability to legally work and left them waiting indefinitely for decisions on their applications.

In a court filing Friday, Angelica Alfonso-Royals, deputy director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency instructed employees to treat the policies “as if they are no longer in effect.” The agency also said in a memo posted on its website that it “strongly disagrees with the court’s order” but that it would “follow its terms pending possible further judicial review.”

As of Friday evening, it was unclear whether the agency had restarted making immigration application decisions. Also on Friday, the administration filed an appeal with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals seeking to pause the decision.

The response came after Judge John J. McConnell Jr. rebuked the Trump administration for failing to immediately comply with the order he issued last week.

The administration argued in a filing Tuesday that the initial order by McConnell, an appointee of President Barack Obama, was preliminary and therefore had not “become effective,” indicating that the department had yet to resume making application decisions.

In response, McConnell quickly entered his judgment Thursday, ordering the government in blunt terms not to stall any further.

“There is no excuse this time,” he wrote. “The government has an obligation to immediately comply with this order.”

McConnell gave the administration until Friday evening to file an update “advising the court as to what specific steps it has taken to comply.”

Democracy Forward, the legal organization representing the assorted unions and immigration aid groups, had accused the government of playing procedural games to deliberately dodge last week’s court order.

“The Trump-Vance administration’s cruel immigration policies have been about chaos, confusion, and inefficiency, and we are proud to challenge these unlawful measures and to have secured a court order blocking the policies,” Skye Perryman, the organization’s president, said in a statement. “The federal government cannot shut down lawful immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from.”

The policies at the center of the case were issued in November after authorities said an Afghan national had shot two National Guard members in Washington. The man, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, has pleaded not guilty.

In his searing 135-page opinion last week, McConnell wrote that the policies effectively made it impossible for many people to remain in the country and that they were improperly fueled by “anti-immigration sentiments.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

A joint strike by the United States and Venezuela killed a leader of the Tren de Aragua transnational gang, President Donald Trump and officials in both countries said Friday, dealing a blow to a syndicate the Trump administration has blamed for an influx of violent crime and illicit drugs.

The strike took place this past week alongside Venezuelan security forces, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, without providing a precise date. He said it targeted a compound housing Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, a founder of Tren de Aragua.

A statement from Venezuela’s communications ministry said the operation took place in Venezuela, in the southeast of the state of Bolívar. Hegseth and Venezuelan officials said Guerrero Flores had been killed in the strike.

Guerrero Flores, 43, was better known by the alias Niño Guerrero, meaning “warrior child.” He was wanted in the United States on federal charges of directing acts of terrorism, alongside other charges.

The CIA, which has dedicated expanded resources to Latin America during Trump’s second term, supplied the intelligence that led to the strike, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the operation.

Trump said on social media that the U.S. military’s Southern Command had conducted the strike at his direction as part of his pledge to dismantle foreign gangs. His administration designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization last year.

Trump said the operation had been conducted with the Venezuelan government, which has become more cooperative with the United States since the United States captured former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and helped install a more pliant replacement, Delcy Rodríguez.

Trump posted a video of a building exploding and invoked the names of crime victims in Georgia and Texas, calling the operation “retribution” for their families.

Trump has often railed against the gang, using it to push his deportation agenda and to justify his military strikes on vessels purportedly ferrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the United States. Critics have questioned whether Tren de Aragua has truly played the dangerous role that Trump says it has.

Gen. Francis L. Donovan, who leads U.S. Southern Command, thanked Venezuelan security forces in a social media post for their support in what he described as a joint operation.

The Venezuelan government said in a statement Friday that a combined operation had targeted organized crime structures. The operation was based on the exchange of intelligence between the two countries, the statement said.

Tren de Aragua originated as a prison gang in Venezuela in the mid-2000s and has since expanded across Latin America and several U.S. cities. The organization is one of the most notorious in the region, focused on sex trafficking, human smuggling and drugs, drawing intense scrutiny from U.S. law enforcement.

The Biden administration in 2024 issued a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to Guerrero Flores. He was charged last year in a New York federal court under the second Trump administration with racketeering, terrorism, drug importation and firearms offenses.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.