Politics
Trump Administration Casts Host of Policies Under Biden as Anti-Christian
The Justice Department on Thursday accused the Biden administration of pushing policies that were unfair to Christians, releasing a report that amounted to the latest rhetorical broadside by the Trump administration over what it calls the “weaponization” of government.
The 197-page document, released by a task force led by the department, sought to portray what President Trump’s advisers contend was anti-Christian bias among those who worked for President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is Roman Catholic. The report, which refers to decision-making at more than a dozen agencies, comes weeks after Mr. Trump publicly attacked the pope.
“The Biden administration’s policies regularly clashed with a Christian worldview and burdened traditional religious practices,” the report said. “These conflicts frequently arose over abortion, gender ideology, and sexual orientation.”
The document is the Justice Department’s latest effort to argue that it is removing purported political bias from the work of prosecutors. But critics say that the department under Mr. Trump has abandoned its tradition of operating independently from the White House, including by pursuing the president’s rivals, like James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, who was indicted this week for posting a photograph last year of seashells on a beach arranged to say “86 47.” The administration argues that the image was a coded threat to kill the president.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department issued a report accusing Biden-era prosecutors of unfairly pursuing anti-abortion activists through the use of a law that makes it a crime to obstruct or intimidate a person seeking abortion services or participating in a religious service at a house of worship. The Trump administration, in turn, has charged dozens of protesters, as well as the former CNN anchor Don Lemon, with violating the same law during a demonstration inside a church in St. Paul, Minn.
In a statement accompanying the release of Thursday’s report, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, vowed that the department would “continue to expose bad actors who targeted Christians, and work tirelessly to restore religious liberty for all Americans of faith.”
The report sharply criticized a leaked internal memo from 2023 by the F.B.I.’s field office in Richmond, Va., that said far-right extremists could be attracted to Catholic churches or groups.
For decades, the F.B.I. has worked to develop sources at churches, universities and mosques, but the Richmond memo quickly became a talking point on the right. Republicans argued that it showed the bureau was targeting Catholics.
F.B.I. officials quickly withdrew the memo after it was leaked, and an internal investigation found no evidence of “malicious intent.” But the new report argues otherwise. The memo, the report asserts, stemmed from a “misplaced reliance on baseless allegations from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the religious affiliation of a single law enforcement target who happened to identify himself as a ‘radical traditional Catholic.’”
Earlier this month, the Justice Department charged the S.P.L.C. with fraud, accusing the group of paying informants inside hate groups not to fight racism and extremism, but to promote them. The group has denied the charges and called it a politically motivated prosecution.
The new report also criticized a memo issued in 2021 by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in response to concerns raised by the National School Boards Association about purported threats to local education officials, as parents and teachers grappled with restrictions enacted during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Garland’s memo ordered the creation of a task force of Justice Department prosecutors and F.B.I. investigators to use their “authority and resources to discourage these threats.”
That directive, however, raised significant internal concerns at the F.B.I. and Justice Department. One senior prosecutor warned that “the vast, vast majority of the behavior cited” by the National School Boards Association did not violate federal law.
“Almost all of the language being used is protected by the First Amendment,” the Justice Department lawyer warned shortly before the Garland memo was issued.
While the Trump administration report cites the Garland memo as an example of anti-Christian bias, the document leaves unclear how school board fights over masks, remote learning and safety in public schools constitute a religious issue.
By Hamed Aleaziz, Alexandra Ostasiewicz, Jon Hazell, Gilad Thaler, Stephanie Swart and Rafaela Balster
June 10, 2026
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BLUE HILL, Maine – Graham Platner, the progressive left, and Donald Trump appear to be the big winners in Tuesday’s high-profile primaries in Maine and South Carolina.
Platner, the oyster farmer and military combat veteran who has been facing plenty of incoming fire amid mounting controversies, cruised to the Democratic nomination Tuesday in left-leaning Maine and will now face longtime moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins in a key race that is among a handful which will likely determine if Republicans hold their Senate majority in the midterm elections.
Meanwhile, in solidly red South Carolina, Trump-backed Sen. Lindsey Graham won a majority of the vote in the Senate GOP primary and will avoid a runoff against a primary challenger from the right.
And the candidate the president endorsed in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, finished on top of a crowded field of contenders and will advance to a runoff election in two weeks against longtime South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who came in second.
Here’s what we learned in the key June 9th primaries.
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Graham Platner and his wife wave on stage to supporters after winning the Democratic Senate primary in Maine, on June 9, 2026 in Blue Hill, Maine (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News)
The left storms back
The convincing victory by Platner, who was backed by progressive champions Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, looks to be another feather in the cap for the left in their intra-party face-off with the establishment.
The primary in Maine was held a week after Iowa state Rep. John Turek, who was supported by longtime Senate Democratic Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, won the Democratic Senate primary and will face Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson in another crucial midterm showdown.
Turek, a wheelchair basketball player who won two Paralympic gold medals, defeated the more progressive candidate, state Sen. Zach Wahls. The divisive and expensive primary battle was viewed as a proxy war between the establishment and anti-establishment wings of the party.
Fast-forward a week and the ballot box performance by Platner, who promotes an economically populist agenda as he takes aim at corporate influences and advocates for the working class, gives a boost to the left.
“The Democratic establishment and powerful interests spent months trying to stop Graham Platner. Instead, they demonstrated that voters in Maine and across America want to elect shake-up-the-system outsiders,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green emphasized.
And Green warned that Platner’s victory “should be a wake-up call for a Democratic establishment that has spent too long underestimating the appeal of economic populism and outsider politics.”
EMBATTLED PLATNER WINS DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY TO TEE UP CRUCIAL MIDTERM SHOWDOWN
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner stand together during a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour stop at the Collins Center for the Arts on the University of Maine campus in Orono, Maine, on May 24, 2026. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
What controversies?
Platner in recent weeks has been facing one of the roughest stretches of his bid for the U.S. Senate.
The candidate has been playing defense the past month, amid multiple controversies. They include inflammatory online comments made on Reddit, a well-publicized and now covered-up tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol, recent reports that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with several women while married, and new allegations last week from ex-girlfriends of a history of rape fantasies, heavy drinking and violent episodes. Platner has called the latest allegations of violence untrue.
On Monday, a day before the primary election, a former high-level staffer from the Platner campaign wrote in the Washington Post that Platner “is not someone who would be good for Maine or for the country.”
While the mounting controversies triggered some Democrats in the nation’s capital to question whether Platner was damaged goods and needed to be replaced, the candidate this past weekend thanked Maine voters for continuing to support him.
“When hurtful things I said on the internet a decade ago came out into the public as I shared my personal journey through PTSD and darkness of recovery and accountability and growth. Maine had my back,” Platner said at a rally Friday not far from his hometown in Down East Maine. “Now, as every single piece of that past and journey gets dug up, litigated, and weaponized, you have my back. And when politically motivated, serious and false accusations are made against me. Maine, you have my back.”
THE GROWING LIST OF CONTROVERSIES THREATENING DEMOCRAT GRAHAM PLATNER’S MAINE SENATE BID
Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner and his wife greet supporters after he won his party’s nomination, at his victory celebration in Blue Hill, Maine on June 9, 2026. (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News)
And voters in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary seemed to shrug off the controversies.
“In trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all,” Platner said in his victory speech as he dismissed news reports about his past misdeeds as immaterial to the Senate election.
“This is a movement about us, about the far too many working far too hard and struggling far too much.”
Trump has a big night
The president wasn’t on the ballot in South Carolina, but he had plenty on the line in the GOP Senate and gubernatorial primaries.
One week after Trump’s endorsement-winning streak in high-profile Republican primaries was snapped, the president’s immense clout over the GOP was on the line again, this time in South Carolina.
And the president easily passed the test.
The candidate Trump endorsed in the Palmetto State’s GOP gubernatorial primary, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, finished first in a crowded field of candidates and clinched one of the two tickets in the race for the nomination.
TRUMP ALLY LINDSEY GRAHAM SURVIVES CHALLENGE FROM GOP’S ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT WING
Evette, who repeatedly spotlighted Trump’s support, now advances to a Republican runoff election in two weeks against South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, the second place finisher, in the race to succeed term-limited GOP Gov. Henry McMaster.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette stand on stage during an election night watch party at the State Fairgrounds in Columbia, S.C., on Feb. 24, 2024. Trump defeated Nikki Haley in the South Carolina Republican primary. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Since no candidate topped 50% of the primary vote to land a majority, Evette and Wilson will battle for the nomination in the June 23 runoff, and the winner will be considered the clear favorite in the general election in the solidly red southeastern state.
Meanwhile, in the South Carolina GOP Senate primary, longtime Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham did win a majority of the vote, and will avoid a runoff, the Associated Press reported.
Graham, who was endorsed by Trump, was facing primary challenges from five candidates, including conservative businessman Mark Lynch, who took aim at the senator over his support for the war in Iran. Lynch was backed by some MAGA leaders who have been critical of the president.
Graham’s campaign and allied political groups spent nearly $20 million to highlight Trump’s support. And the president joined Graham and Evette for a primary eve tele-rally.
The brute force of the president’s endorsement power has been on display in GOP primaries over the past month, with his candidates ousting incumbents he targeted in showdowns in Indiana, Louisiana, Kentucky and Texas that grabbed plenty of national attention.
But his 11th-hour endorsement of Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra of Iowa a week and a half ago — which came on the same day he also backed Evette — in the race to succeed retiring GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds wasn’t enough to muscle the three-term congressman to victory.
Feenstra was narrowly edged by Zach Lahn, a businessman, farmer and former political strategist who was backed by the political wings of MAHA — the acronym for the Make America Healthy Again movement aligned with Trump Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and Turning Point USA, the powerful conservative organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
In the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary, the major contenders had long been highlighting their support for Trump and his agenda, in hopes of landing his support.
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Trump, after staying neutral for months, endorsed Evette, praising her as an “America First Patriot” and a “WINNER” in his announcement.
In her primary night speech, Evette thanks the president and touted that she’s a “Trump-endorsed businesswoman and conservative who’s going to take the fight to the radical left.”
Supporters of a half-cent sales tax proposed to help fund health services in Los Angeles County declared victory Tuesday after days of steadily gaining ground as more ballots were counted.
The latest results show the “yes” camp ahead by a slim margin, with just more than 50% of the vote. The measure needs a simple majority to win.
“Today, Angelenos sent a clear message: we take care of each other,” said Jim Mangia, chief executive of St. John’s Community Health and a spokesperson for the campaign, in a statement. “For months, we watched Washington make decisions that stripped healthcare away from hundreds of thousands of our neighbors — and today, Los Angeles County answered.”
The campaign said it would be organizing a news conference Wednesday to celebrate the “historic win.”
The proposal, on the ballot as Measure ER, had gained traction since election night, when results showed the tax had failed to gain a majority of support among early voters. Voters have not rejected a sales tax hike in L.A. County since 2012, when a transportation measure fell just short of a needed two-thirds majority with 66.1% support.
Approval of Measure ER would impose a new sales tax of half a penny of every dollar spent in the county, with the proceeds going to local hospitals and clinics that say they’re bleeding funding after federal cuts. Officials anticipate it will bring in $1 billion annually to patch the holes in the health services network.
The tax, which was championed by a coalition of healthcare advocates, takes effect Oct. 1 and will last for five years.
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