US airports continue to see long lines and fewer TSA staff amid partial DHS shutdown – live | Trump administration
Long lines and fewer TSA personnel continue to be seen at US airports due to partial DHS closure
The Department of Homeland Security’s partial shutdown continued Wednesday as longer-than-usual lines at major U.S. airports caused passenger turmoil this week.
Because Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel who have been working without pay for more than a month have not reported for duty amid the standoff, some airports are officially advising travelers to arrive four hours before their scheduled flights.
On Tuesday, Delta partially suspended its special service desk for members of Congress until TSA funding is restored. The service desk is used to help members of Congress book flights at special government fares, secure airport escorts, and make last-minute flight changes.
on wednesday, A CBS reporter noticed A familiar face waiting in the long line at Houston international airport: Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr.
important events
Cambodian man deported to Eswatini by Trump administration has been repatriated, lawyer says
A Cambodian man deported by the United States to the African kingdom of Eswatini under the Trump administration’s third-country program was released and repatriated Wednesday after spending five months in custody at a maximum-security prison with other deportees, his lawyer told The Associated Press.
Pheap Rom was deported to the southern African country in October and held in Matsapha Prison. His US-based lawyer, Tin Thanh Nguyen, told the AP that he took a commercial flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, to begin his journey to Cambodia.
The United States has sent 19 immigrants from other countries to Eswatini in three groups since July. Rom is the second person to be repatriated, after a Jamaican man was flown home in September.
Two of the leading progressives on Capitol Hill will introduce bills today aimed at protecting workers’ rights in the brave new world of artificial intelligence.
Vermont’s left-wing senator Bernie Sanders will join forces with New York’s Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to introduce the AI data center moratorium ct, which they say will ensure AI benefits workers, is safe and effective, and does not harm communities or the environment.
It will also impose a moratorium on all new AI data centers pending the implementation of national measures to protect workers, consumers and communities and to guarantee privacy and civil rights.
Gavin Newsom describes Elon Musk as ‘one of the biggest disappointments of our time’
California Governor Gavin Newsom described Elon Musk as “one of the great disappointments of our time” and accused the billionaire Tesla owner of leaving the electric vehicle market to China.
I’m talking axiosNewsom, widely seen as a frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, said Musk has all but given up on the American EV market, which he pioneered by turning to robotics.
“It breaks my heart,” he said, comparing Musk to Thomas Edison.
“I took down one of the first Teslas. I became one of their biggest advocates. It was the regulations in California that created the conditions that allowed him to take the risk of becoming a multi-billionaire, perhaps a trillionaire.”
“It’s going to allow for the biggest own goals – one of the biggest own goals of the next decade is ceding the electric vehicle space to China. They have 70% of the global electric vehicle market. This is about their statecraft… This is a national security game and I’m really scared of what’s going to happen to American legacy automakers.”
He attributed some of Musk’s waning interest in electric vehicles to Donald Trump, who has frequently criticized the cars as “a scam” and “too expensive.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) intensified its investigation into former CIA director John Brennan; because Donald Trump is seeking revenge for what he calls the “Russia hoax” aimed at discrediting his supposed 2016 election victory.
The ministry requested documents from the House of Representatives’ intelligence committee regarding Brennan, who headed the agency during Barack Obama’s presidency. NBC reported.
The request led the committee to vote Tuesday night to send several secret hearing transcripts to the Justice Department.
A spokesman for the committee’s Republican members said the move “could advance the accountability process that many Americans desperately expect to develop.”
Brennan has been a target of the Justice Department since national intelligence director Tulsa Gabbard called for Obama and other national security officials in his administration to be prosecuted for allegedly concocting a “treasonous plot” that she said was intended to show that Trump’s 2016 election victory was aided by Russian interference.
White House says Trump ‘did nothing wrong’ amid secret map allegations
Hello, welcome to the live blog of US politics.
The White House said Donald Trump “did nothing wrong” amid reports that he showed a secret map during his 2022 flight to his golf club in New Jersey.
The president also kept a sensitive record of his first term that only six people had access to, according to a letter released Wednesday by a top House Democrat.
The letter from Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, a leading Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, provides public insight into the investigation into Trump’s hiding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
That quotes a newly released Justice Department memo from January 2023 in which prosecutors cited evidence they said they had accumulated as they moved toward a felony indictment of Trump that would be filed months later.
Responding to Raskin’s letter, the White House said Raskin was not trustworthy. “It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to the unstable Jack Smith and his lies about 2026,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said.
“President Trump did nothing wrong, so Biden easily defeated the Justice Department’s unprecedented legal campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory.”
The incident was described in a Jan. 13, 2023 briefing note prepared for then-attorney general Merrick Garland; nearly six months before special counsel Jack Smith accused Trump of keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club.
Trump’s alleged reveal of the map, as explained in the memo, would be the second time Wiles is known to have waved around a secret map in front of him. The indictment charging Trump also describes an incident in which Trump showed people a secret map at a Bedminster club in New Jersey.
Read our full report here:
In other developments:
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Violence continued across much of the Middle East a day after Donald Trump said the US was having “very good” talks with Iran The war in the region should end as soon as possible. Iran targeted Israel, Gulf Arab states and northern Iraq on Tuesday, while Israeli and US warplanes continued to launch strikes in Tehran and other targets in the Islamic Republic. More here.
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Democrats managed to flip the Florida statehouse in the district that is home to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. Democrat Emily Gregory defeated Republican Jon Maples, who had the support of the US president, in the special election in Florida’s 87th state House district. The Associated Press called the race Tuesday evening, and Gregory, a public health expert and small business owner, was ahead by more than 2 percentage points. More here.
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Donald Trump appointed Markwayne Mullin as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday (DHS), while Senate Republicans unveiled a compromise that would restore funding to most of the agency but exclude reforms to immigration enforcement that Democrats have demanded. More here.
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Donald Trump called voting by mail “cheating” at an event in Memphis, Tennessee, just days after voting by mail in person. “Voting by mail means mail fraud. I call it mail fraud, and we have to do something about it,” the president said Monday at a roundtable on his administration’s crime task force. More here.
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Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers shaken by White House enforcement of immigration law As the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown continues, TSA employees enter their sixth week without pay, and the rush to airports continues. More than 400 TSA workers have walked off the job since the shutdown began in February; Major US airports are reporting high call rates among workers, leading to longer security wait times. More here.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom backed away from previous statements likening Israel to an “apartheid state” In a new interview published with Politico on Tuesday. In the interview, the Democrat, who is widely expected to enter the presidential race in 2028, said that when he used the term three weeks ago, he meant that it would also apply to the future of Israel if Israel continued on its current course. More here.
