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Video: Secret Service Director Faces Bipartisan Calls to Resign

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Video: Secret Service Director Faces Bipartisan Calls to Resign

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Secret Service Director Faces Bipartisan Calls to Resign

The Secret Service director, Kimberly A. Cheatle, repeatedly refused to answer specific questions in a House oversight committee hearing on security failures that led to an assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump.

“How can a 20-year-old with his father’s AR-15 assault weapon climb onto a roof with a direct 150 yard line of sight to the speaker’s podium without the Secret Service or local police stopping him?” “I would like to know those answers as well, which is why we are going through these investigations to be able to determine that fully.” “Can you answer why the Secret Service didn’t place a single agent on the roof?” ”We are still looking into the advanced process and the decisions that were made.” ”OK, OK. How many Secret Service agents were assigned to President Trump on the day of the rally?” ”Again, I’m not going to get into the specifics of the numbers of personnel.” “Do you really plan to keep avoiding questions and the American people’s questions — ours and the American people’s questions — for the next 60 days?” “I’m not avoiding questions. I want to make sure that I am providing factual and accurate information.” “Certainly. But is there no in between?” “Do you really believe that the majority of this country has confidence in you right now?” “I believe that the country deserves answers, and I am committed to finding those answers and providing those answers.” “Well, look, I believe, Director Cheatle, that you should resign.” “You should have come today ready to give us answers. I call upon you to resign today — today.” “I will be joining the chairman in calling for the resignation of the director. The director has lost the confidence of Congress at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country.” “This committee is not known for its model of bipartisanship, but I think today we came together unanimously in our disappointment for your lack of answers.”

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Some Agencies Urge Staff Not to Comply With Elon Musk’s Performance Email

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Some Agencies Urge Staff Not to Comply With Elon Musk’s Performance Email

Several Trump-appointed agency leaders urged federal workers not to comply with Elon Musk’s order to summarize their accomplishments for the past week or be removed from their positions, even as Mr. Musk doubled down on his demand over the weekend.

Their instructions in effect countermanded the order of Mr. Musk across much of the government, challenging the broad authority President Trump has given the world’s richest man to make drastic changes to the federal bureaucracy. The standoff serves as one of the first significant tests of how far Mr. Musk’s power will extend.

As the directive ricocheted across the federal government, officials at some agencies, including the F.B.I., the office coordinating America’s intelligence agencies and the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, told their employees not to respond.

Mr. Musk’s email had even reached the inboxes of sitting federal judges — who are in the judicial branch, not the executive. The administrative office for the federal courts advised judges and staff that “this email did not originate from the judiciary or the administrative office and we suggest that no action be taken.”

The public pushback reflects a growing unease — and, in some cases, alarm — behind the scenes across the Trump administration about the perception of Mr. Musk’s unchecked power.

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The unease runs from lower staff to some cabinet secretaries, who have tired of having to justify specific intricacies of agency policy and having to scramble to address unforeseen controversies that Mr. Musk has ignited.

Those officials are aware that he has influence over the president privately, and they fear him using X, the social media website he owns, to single out people he views as obstructing him, according to one senior administration official.

Hours after a senior Defense Department official publicly and firmly pushed back on Mr. Musk’s directive on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Musk singled him out for retribution, saying on X that “anyone with the attitude of that Pentagon official needs to look for a new job.”

One person who was quiet about the controversy throughout much of the weekend was Mr. Trump; after posting on social media on Saturday morning that he wanted Mr. Musk to be more “aggressive,” and then bragging about the purge of federal workers in a speech hours later, the president had remained mute on the subject for much of Sunday.

That afternoon, however, Mr. Trump posted a meme, which he said came from Mr. Musk, mocking federal workers who had to explain their duties and accomplishments, but he did not weigh in on the internal government conflict between his appointees.

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Mr. Musk’s public statements about his cost-cutting effort, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, have often expressed an open contempt for the federal work force, which includes some of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

By Sunday afternoon, some of the pushback against Mr. Musk from administration officials — coming in large part from the national security apparatus and law enforcement agencies — had become public and explicit.

“The Department of Defense is responsible for reviewing the performance of its personnel and it will conduct any review in accordance with its own procedures,” Darin S. Selnick, the acting Pentagon official in charge of personnel, said in a statement, instructing Pentagon employees to “for now, please pause any response.”

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of the office of national intelligence, ordered all intelligence community officers not to respond, in a message to intelligence officials reviewed by The New York Times.

“Given the inherently sensitive and classified nature of our work, I.C. employees should not respond to the OPM email,” Ms. Gabbard wrote.

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Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, wrote in an email to employees that “the F.B.I., through the office of the director, is in charge of all our review processes,” telling workers that they should “for now, please pause any responses.”

Senior personnel officials at the State and Homeland Security Departments also instructed their employees to not respond to the email.

At the Justice Department and F.B.I., the threatening signals from Mr. Musk were met with a mix of anger and amazement that anyone would issue such a blanket demand without consideration for sensitive areas such as criminal investigations, legal confidentiality or grand jury material.

Some law enforcement supervisors quickly told employees to wait for more guidance from managers on Monday before responding to the demand, according to current and former officials.

Other departments gave conflicting guidance. The Department of Health and Human Services told its employees on Sunday morning to follow the directive. An hour later, an email from the Trump-appointed acting director of the National Institutes of Health, a subordinate agency, told employees to hold off on responding. Hours later, the health department told all employees to “pause” responses to the ultimatum.

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On Saturday, Mr. Musk posted a demand for government employees to summarize their accomplishments for the week, warning that failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Soon after, the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal work force, sent an email asking civil servants for a list of accomplishments, but it did not include the threat of removal for not complying.

Unions representing federal workers suggested that Mr. Musk’s order was not valid. They advised their members to follow guidance from their supervisors on how, and whether, to respond to the email.

In a scathing letter on Sunday, Everett B. Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees — the largest federal employee union — told the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management that the email sent to federal employees was “plainly unlawful” and “thoughtless.”

Mr. Kelley demanded that the order be retracted, and noted, “By allowing the unelected and unhinged Elon Musk to dictate O.P.M.’s actions, you have demonstrated a lack of regard for the integrity of federal employees and their critical work.”

Multiple intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, had warned employees that responding could risk inadvertently disclosing classified work.

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Although Mr. Musk’s original email told employees not to include classified material, current and former intelligence officials said that if an adversary gained access to thousands of unclassified accounts of intelligence officers’ work that it would be able to piece together sensitive details or learn about projects that were supposed to remain secret.

Representative Mike Lawler, a New York Republican whose seat may be among the most fiercely contested in 2026, raised doubt about the order even as he gave broader support to Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting effort.

“I don’t know how that’s necessarily feasible,” Mr. Lawler said of the ultimatum. “Obviously, a lot of federal employees are under union contract.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, also criticized Mr. Musk’s order.

“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform,” she wrote in a statement on social media. “The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it.”

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It is unclear what legal basis Mr. Musk would have to justify mass firings based on responses to the email, and the White House and the Office of Personnel Management did not immediately answer questions about the threat of removal.

But Mr. Musk — who made similar unconventional demands during his takeover of Twitter, now known as X — insisted on Sunday morning that the order amounted to “a very basic pulse check.”

In a series of posts, Mr. Musk also promoted baseless claims of wage fraud — that a significant number of “non-existent” or dead people were employed in the federal work force, and that criminals were using the fake employees to collect government paychecks.

“They are covering immense fraud,” Mr. Musk said in response to a post by a supporter that said that “the left is flipping out about a simple email.”

His claims echo a similar one that tens of millions of dead people may be receiving fraudulent Social Security payments. A recent report by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general — a watchdog that investigates the program for waste, fraud and abuse — found that “almost none” of the people in the agency’s database who had likely died were receiving payments.

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Reporting was contributed by Julian E. Barnes, Hamed Aleaziz, Apoorva Mandavilli, Devlin Barrett, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Ken Bensinger, Kate Conger, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Adam Goldman, Minho Kim, Kate Zernike, Lisa Friedman and Margot Sanger-Katz.

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Germany’s election winner pledges ‘independence from US’

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Germany’s election winner pledges ‘independence from US’

Germany’s Friedrich Merz promised to “achieve independence” from the US after his centre-right bloc won federal elections, putting him at the head of a potentially complex coalition during a time of upheaval for Europe. 

In an election where Germany shifted to the right, Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) came first with 28.6 per cent of the vote on Sunday, leaving it in need of at least one other coalition partner to secure a working parliamentary majority.

Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came second, with its highest ever vote share of about 21 per cent.

Within hours of polls closing, Merz declared that Germany had to fundamentally remake its security arrangements and end a decades-long reliance on Washington, given that US President Donald Trump was “largely indifferent” to Europe’s fate.

Merz said: “I am in close contact with many prime ministers — heads of government of the EU. And it must be an absolute priority to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we actually achieve independence from the USA.

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“I wouldn’t have thought I’d have to say something like that . . . But after Donald Trump’s statements, it is clear that the Americans, at least this American government, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

Merz, who said he was unsure about the future of Nato, also highlighted Washington’s interventions in the German election campaign, and compared it to Russian interference.

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The Trump administration has openly courted the AfD and has criticised Germany’s mainstream politicians for refusing to co-operate with a party that has flirted with Nazi-era slogans, urged an end to sanctions on Russia and called for mass deportations of migrants.

Trump in recent weeks has blindsided Europe by holding direct talks with Russia over ending the war in Ukraine and has threatened to pull US security guarantees from the continent. Germany hosts the largest contingent of American troops stationed in Europe.

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Trump earlier on Sunday described the election result as proof that “the people of Germany got tired of the no common sense agenda, especially on energy and immigration, that has prevailed for so many years”.

Merz has little option but to form a coalition with outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic party, which won a little over 16 per cent of the votes — its worst result since 1887.

But on Sunday night, it remained unclear whether Merz could negotiate a ruling majority strong enough to drive through fundamental reforms, including revisions to a constitutionally enshrined limit on public borrowing.

“I know the scale of the challenge that lies ahead of us,” Merz said. “I approach this with the greatest respect. And I know that it will not be easy.”

“We had a hard campaign but now we will talk to each other,” Merz said, adding it might be even more difficult to form a coalition than he had expected during the election campaign.

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His political calculations were complicated by the fact that Merz’s traditional partner, the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP), was on course to fall short of the 5 per cent threshold to enter the Bundestag.

Voter turnout reached its highest since German reunification in 1990, according to exit poll data, at a level of 84 per cent.

The preliminary results mark a big swing to the right in Germany after a series of deadly attacks by migrants fuelled anti-immigrant sentiment.

German voters shunned Scholz’s unpopular coalition with the Greens and the FDP. The Eurozone’s largest economy has stagnated for the past two years as German industry grappled with high energy prices and Chinese competition.

Scholz indicated he would step back from frontline politics after “a bitter result”.

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Alice Weidel, co-leader of Alternative for Germany, celebrates early results in the election © Soeren Stache/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Alice Weidel, the AfD co-leader, celebrated the party almost doubling its vote share from 2021, to secure the biggest far-right gains in Germany since the second world war.

“We have led a magnificent campaign,” Weidel said, as she stressed her party was open to coalition talks with the CDU/CSU to meet “the will of the people”.

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After witnessing three years of infighting among top members of Scholz’s fractious coalition, strategists from the CDU and its Bavarian sister party the CSU wanted to avoid needing more than one partner to form a government.

In one potentially helpful outcome for Merz, the far-left Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) looked to have fallen just short of securing seats in parliament, which would have made it impossible for the CDU/CSU to build a working majority with just the SPD.

Under the German electoral system, parties winning less than 5 per cent of the vote are excluded from parliament and their votes are redistributed, strengthening the successful groups.

The next parliament is set to contain five parties, including the Greens, AfD and the far-left Die Linke.

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Holger Schmieding, economist at Berenberg Bank, warned of a “serious risk” that fringe parties might be strong enough to block changes to the German constitution.

“If so, they could veto any loosening of the debt brake enshrined in the constitution”, while it was “crucial to raise spending for the military and Ukraine and ease the tax burden for workers and firms”, he added. 

Data visualisation by Martin Stabe and Jonathan Vincent

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Denver police remember former DPD officer killed in shootout at Pennsylvania hospital

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Denver police remember former DPD officer killed in shootout at Pennsylvania hospital
Denver police remember former DPD officer killed in shootout at Pennsylvania hospital – CBS Colorado

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The Denver Police Department is mourning the loss of a former DPD officer killed in a shootout with a gunman in Pennsylvania Saturday.

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