Sept. 9, 2025, 9:47 p.m. ETPresident Trump speaking to reporters in front of Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab restaurant in Washington on Tuesday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesPresident Trump ventured one-tenth of a mile beyond the gates of the White House for dinner on Tuesday night, only to be met almost immediately by protesters who called him “the Hitler of our time.”Mr. Trump made the short trek from the White House to Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab to show that his federal crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital was working. But as he made his way through the restaurant, protesters began to heckle him.“Free D.C.,” they shouted, according to videos posted on social media. “Free Palestine. Trump is the Hitler of our time.”For Mr. Trump, the visit was supposed to be a victory lap.“We’re standing right in the middle of D.C.,” Mr. Trump told reporters before going into the restaurant. “This was one of the most unsafe cities in the country. Now it’s as safe as anywhere in the country.”But Mr. Trump remains deeply unpopular in Washington, and videos of the protesters confronting the president quickly ricocheted across social media.It was Mr. Trump’s first meal at a Washington restaurant since returning to the White House in January. During his first term, the president was a regular visitor to the Trump International Hotel, just down the street from the White House, but that hotel closed in 2022.On Tuesday night, Mr. Trump was joined by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and a number of other top White House officials.The president deployed the National Guard to Washington last month as part of an effort to reduce crime, even though crime had been falling in the city. The White House has eagerly touted the number of arrests since Mr. Trump declared a crime emergency, though many of the arrests have been for minor offenses. The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington has also had to downgrade or dismiss a number of cases after failing to secure indictments from grand juries.Sept. 9, 2025, 8:52 p.m. ETSusan Monarez, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is set to testify before Congress next week after being fired last month amid a clash with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Her firing, which came just a month after she was sworn in, and the resignation of other senior officials in protest were the latest signs of turmoil in an agency still reeling from mass layoffs and a shooting earlier in August. “Americans need to know what has happened and is happening at the C.D.C.,” Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of the Senate health committee, said in a statement announcing the hearing.Sept. 9, 2025, 8:28 p.m. ETTrump denied that it was his signature on the lewd note and drawing from a 2003 book for Jeffrey Epstein, despite the note’s signature resembling other examples of Trump’s personal correspondence from that era. “That’s not my signature and it’s not the way I speak,” said Trump, who has a long history of making crude and offensive comments about women. “That’s not my language. It’s nonsense.”Sept. 9, 2025, 8:19 p.m. ET“I’m not thrilled about the whole situation,” Trump says of the Israeli strike against Hamas officials in Qatar. “We are not thrilled about how that went down today.”Sept. 9, 2025, 8:05 p.m. ETPresident Trump says his administration is in talks with another governor to deploy federal law enforcement to a new city. He said will announce the city “probably tomorrow.” Trump just briefly took questions from reporters before entering a seafood restaurant in downtown Washington, an appearance that he said was meant to show the results of his federal crackdown on crime in D.C.“We’re standing right in the middle of D.C..” Trump told reporters outside of the restaurant located around the corner from the White House. “This was one of the most unsafe cities in the country. Now it’s as safe as anywhere in the country.”Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesSept. 9, 2025, 8:05 p.m. ETA Federal District Court judge in San Francisco has indefinitely paused proceedings in a complicated case brought by the state against Trump’s use of the National Guard in Los Angeles. The judge said that because an appeals court is reviewing an order he issued barring the federal government from using the troops for policing tasks, he is not confident he has jurisdiction for now to consider other issues raised by the state.Sept. 9, 2025, 7:24 p.m. ETChristina Jewett, Rebecca Robbins and Dani BlumThe White House issued a memo Tuesday evening directing pharmaceutical companies to disclose more information about the risks associated with medications in their ads. The measure fell far short of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s previously stated goal of banning such ads, instead calling for them to be truthful and not misleading. An announcement of the measure never happened Tuesday; the memo was posted on the White House website two hours after the scheduled event.Sept. 9, 2025, 7:18 p.m. ETNews AnalysisPresident Trump has insisted that he played no role in a bawdy birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein that was made public on Monday.Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesThroughout his presidency, Donald Trump has proved himself adept at evading the controversies that have dogged him on a near-daily basis. With the vast powers of the presidency at his disposal, he often succeeds in pivoting the national conversation to focus on political terrain he finds more favorable, like immigration or crime.But for weeks now, there has been one controversy the president has been unable to evade: the public clamor over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender.Now, with the release this week of new information from Mr. Epstein’s estate, including a suggestive note apparently signed by Mr. Trump, the drip-drip-drip of revelations is complicating the White House strategy of brushing off the entire controversy.The president’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Tuesday was once again confronted with questions about the so-called Epstein files, a collection of documents from the law enforcement investigation into Mr. Epstein’s abuse of girls and women.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, fielded several questions about the so-called Epstein files during a news briefing on Tuesday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe White House has denied for weeks that Mr. Trump sent a bawdy birthday note to Mr. Epstein in 2003, the subject of an earlier Wall Street Journal report. But on Monday, the House Oversight Committee obtained the document and released it.Suddenly, there it was out in the open for all to see. The drawing of a naked woman. The strange reference to a “secret” shared between Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein.In response, Ms. Leavitt at first deflected. She accused Democrats of opportunistically clamoring to release the Epstein documents while Mr. Trump was president, something they did not make a major push for during the Biden presidency.“Why are the Democrats all of a sudden caring about this? It’s because they are desperately trying to concoct a hoax to smear the president of the United States,” Ms. Leavitt said.Then she shifted to denial.Ms. Leavitt again denied that Mr. Trump had written the note in question. She said the White House would even support a professional handwriting analyst’s evaluation of the signature, which she said would vindicate the president.The signature on the note closely matches the first-name-only version of the way the president signed his name in letters to New York City officials at the time.Ms. Leavitt was then asked about another item in the documents released Monday: an oversized check that purports to be a joking payment of $22,500 from Mr. Trump to Mr. Epstein, to buy a “fully depreciated” woman.Ms. Leavitt again denied Mr. Trump’s involvement, saying he “absolutely” had not signed the check in question.But even as Ms. Leavitt called the situation a “hoax” and claimed Mr. Trump had no role in the documents released, she said she had never claimed they were fake.The documents were subpoenaed from the Epstein estate. Under questioning from reporters, Ms. Leavitt said she “did not say the documents are a hoax.” Instead, she suggested that someone must have forged Mr. Trump’s signature. “The president has one of the most famous signatures in the world, and he has for many, many years,” she said.It was clear she was following the lead of her boss.Mr. Trump’s signature, both current and previous iterations, has been the subject of debate. Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York TimesThroughout the month of July, Mr. Trump repeatedly attempted to instruct the media and fellow Republicans to move on from the Epstein files. In a post on Truth Social, he urged the G.O.P. to “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”But the clamor for the files persisted, and the president repeatedly referred to the controversy as a “hoax,” angering Mr. Epstein’s victims.After The Wall Street Journal reported on the Epstein birthday note, Mr. Trump filed suit accusing the paper and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, of defaming him.“These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. (Mr. Trump has long drawn pictures and even sold them at auction.)He repeated his denial on Tuesday night, saying that “anybody that’s covered me for a long time knows that’s not my language. It’s nonsense.”Democrats have seized on the controversy. But more concerning for Mr. Trump, he has not been able to convince all Republicans to back off an effort to release the files.Four Republicans, Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, have joined with Democrats to support what is called a discharge petition to force the release of the files.Representatives Ro Khanna, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie at a “Stand With Survivors” rally at the Capitol last week. Credit...Eric Lee for The New York TimesStill, Republicans have mostly fought the effort, and G.O.P. leaders in Congress have largely sided with Mr. Trump’s insistence that he played no role in the bawdy birthday note to Mr. Epstein.“I’m told that it’s fake,” Speaker Mike Johnson said of the note.Representative James R. Comer, the Kentucky Republican who leads the Oversight Committee, said that he accepted Mr. Trump’s denial about the note.“The president says he did not sign it, so I take the president at his word,” Mr. Comer said on Tuesday.He added that he was not inclined to investigate the signature’s authenticity, even as Mr. Comer is leading an investigation into the legitimacy of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s signature on documents that were signed with an autopen.Michael Gold contributed reporting.Sept. 9, 2025, 5:50 p.m. ETSmoke billowed after explosions in Doha’s capital Qatar on Tuesday.Credit...Jacqueline Penney/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRepublicans in Congress were divided on Tuesday over Israel’s decision to strike senior members of Hamas’s leadership in Qatar, a nation closely allied with the United States, with some cheering an attack that the Trump administration said was regrettable.The White House gave contradictory information about whether the United States had known in advance or attempted to warn Qatar about the strike, which Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, called “an unfortunate incident.”But some of the president’s top allies on Capitol Hill said it was entirely appropriate, arguing that Israel should be free to take any action necessary to kill Hamas leaders linked to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war in Gaza.The Qatari government said it had received no warning from Washington or Jerusalem before the attack. Ms. Leavitt said the president had called top officials in the Qatari government afterward to assure them “that such a thing will not happen again on their soil.”Qatar has been a primary mediator in talks to end the two-year conflict between Israel and Hamas. But Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said the time for negotiation has passed.“I don’t think we told Pakistan before we took out bin Laden,” Mr. Graham said, comparing Israel’s strike to the U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.Israel’s strike was “not surprising,” said Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.Mr. Risch said he was not concerned that the strike could lead to a wider conflict in the region.“Any member of Hamas who had anything to do with the invasion of Israel is in jeopardy. It’s a given,” he added.And Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, said he had “no objection to the decision to take out their leadership,” using a profane phrase referring to how actions have consequences.A few Republicans said they were worried that the strike could strain American ties with Qatar.“I would like to know who O.K.’d it, if people in Qatar were involved with it at all,” said Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee.Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the former chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said the decision by the Israeli government to carry out the strike in a third country was “a pretty extraordinary move.”And some Democrats warned that Israel’s attack in Qatar was a strategic error that could jeopardize negotiations for the release of hostages and a cease-fire.“It really complicates it tremendously,” said Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, adding: “This is a government that was has been helping us for decades.”Sept. 9, 2025, 5:44 p.m. ETAfter weeks of tensions with India’s prime minister, Trump just said on social media that there is a thaw. “I am pleased to announce that India, and the United States of America, are continuing negotiations to address the Trade Barriers between our two Nations. I look forward to speaking with my very good friend, Prime Minister Modi, in the upcoming weeks,” he wrote. “I feel certain that there will be no difficulty in coming to a successful conclusion for both of our Great Countries!”Sept. 9, 2025, 5:40 p.m. ETChief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ordered both sides to file briefs by Friday in a convoluted case involving presidential power.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York TimesChief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Tuesday temporarily paused a federal judge’s ruling ordering the Trump administration to pay out $4 billion in foreign aid that had been appropriated by Congress.The chief justice, acting on his own, issued an interim “administrative stay” of the ruling and ordered the challengers to file their brief by Friday. The full court is likely to rule on whether to issue a longer pause soon after that, probably next week, in a convoluted case that centers on presidential authority and Congress’s power of the purse.Chief Justice Roberts’s order noted that the money is the subject of a proposal from the administration pending before Congress. That proposal, known as a “pocket rescission,” is a legally untested effort to claw back appropriated money by waiting so late in the fiscal year to make the request that lawmakers do not have time to reject it before the funding expires. It could make the court challenge moot.The fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, before the 45-day period in which Congress is required to consider a rescission request from the White House. Republicans could bring the matter to a vote sooner, but party leaders have shown little appetite for resisting the president’s spending demands and asserting their own prerogatives.The case before the Supreme Court has reached the justices three times. In an emergency application filed Monday, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, told the court that the judge’s order requiring it to spend $4 billion in payments by the end of the month raised “a grave and urgent threat to the separation of powers.”Mr. Sauer noted the proposal before Congress. “While proposed rescissions are pending, presidents do not spend the funds, for obvious reasons: it would be self-defeating and senseless for the executive branch to obligate the very funds that it is asking Congress to rescind,” he wrote. “Yet the new injunction would force the executive branch to start obligating those funds at breakneck speed to meet the Sept. 30 deadline, even as Congress is considering the rescission proposal and before its 45 days to do so elapse.”The application was the latest in a barrage of emergency requests by the administration seeking broad executive authority, including the power to halt federal spending appropriated by Congress for programs at odds with President Trump’s agenda.The Supreme Court, with six conservative justices, has proved receptive to most of the administration’s claims, handing the president a series of technically temporary victories that have nevertheless had broad practical consequences. In emergency rulings, the justices have allowed Mr. Trump to fire independent agency regulators, cut grants to teacher training programs and remove protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants.Still, in an earlier iteration of the foreign aid case, in March, the chief justice and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with the three liberal justices, rejected Mr. Trump’s request to freeze nearly $2 billion while the case continued in the lower courts.On his first day in office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order temporarily ending programs around the world to determine whether they were “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the president.”The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council, two nonprofit groups, challenged the freeze as an unconstitutional infringement on Congress’s authority over spending.The case has bounced around the court system. The latest application concerns a ruling last week from Judge Amir Ali of the Federal District Court in Washington that said the administration had “given no justification to displace the bedrock expectation that Congress’s appropriations must be followed” and requiring the administration to allow the funds to flow.Sept. 9, 2025, 5:33 p.m. ETPresident Trump issued something of a clarification on Truth Social about the timeline of when the administration was informed about an Israeli attack against Hamas officials earlier today in Qatar. In his post, Trump said he learned about the impending attack from the U.S. military, not Israel, and immediately instructed his envoy Steve Witkoff to warn the Qataris, but that Witkoff could not do so before the attack took place.Sept. 9, 2025, 4:45 p.m. ETThe Port of Los Angeles in May.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York TimesThe Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to fast-track review of the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs, accepting a case that will test the limits of executive power and the president’s signature economic initiative.The court set a brisk briefing schedule and said it would hear arguments in early November.A federal appeals court last month invalidated many of President Trump’s punishing global tariffs, saying the law he relied on did not authorize the administration’s program. The import taxes remain in effect while the litigation continues.In a 7-to-4 ruling in late August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the president had unlawfully used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose steep taxes on major U.S. trading partners.Last week, Mr. Trump’s lawyers urged the justices to review the ruling quickly by adding the case to the court’s calendar for the new term that begins in October. They issued a stark warning against allowing the appeals court ruling to stand, saying it threatens to unwind trade deals.“That decision casts a pall of uncertainty upon ongoing foreign negotiations that the president has been pursuing through tariffs over the past five months, jeopardizing both already negotiated framework deals and ongoing negotiations,” according to the filing from Solicitor General D. John Sauer.“Few cases have so clearly called out for this court’s swift resolution.”While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has repeatedly granted Mr. Trump’s emergency requests and cleared the way for the administration to at least temporarily put into place its policies, the tariffs case will be the first occasion for the justices to hear arguments and weigh the underlying legal merits of a key administration priority.Five small businesses and a dozen states sued over the tariffs, saying Mr. Trump’s actions were unlawful and that the powers to tax must remain with Congress. Their position has support from a coalition of prominent conservative and libertarian lawyers, scholars and former officials.“These unlawful tariffs are inflicting serious harm on small businesses and jeopardizing their survival. We hope for a prompt resolution of this case for our clients,” Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, said in a statement.The Constitution generally gives Congress the power to tax. But a 1977 statute gives the president broad emergency powers to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat” to “the national security, foreign policy or economy of the United States.” That includes the power to regulate imports. The president’s lawyers say that language affords him the authority to impose tariffs when he believe an emergency exists.Mr. Trump and his economic advisers say the tariffs and subsequent negotiations with trading partners are reversing decades of trade policies that have reduced U.S. manufacturing capacity and military readiness. The levies, they argue, have spurred other countries to invest in the U.S. economy.But the appeals court said the emergency law does not give Mr. Trump the authority to impose his sprawling tariffs program. The majority did not decide whether the statute might allow the president to impose more limited tariffs, finding Mr. Trump’s particular program so significant and enduring that it must be expressly authorized by Congress.Mr. Trump used the emergency law last month to tax imports from about 90 countries and previously invoked it to impose tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico.Other presidents have invoked the emergency statute, typically to issue sanctions, but Mr. Trump is the first to try to use the emergency powers to impose broad levies of 10 to 50 percent on trading partners. The administration can turn to other statutes to impose tariffs, but they are more limited than the emergency powers he has relied on.Separately, the Supreme Court in June refused to fast-track a second case from two toy manufacturers challenging part of the president’s tariffs program. In that case, the companies were seeking to bypass the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has scheduled argument for Sept. 30. A district court judge sided with the companies, finding that the tariffs were not authorized under the emergency statute and were “an existential threat to their businesses.”Lawyers for the toy manufacturers renewed their request to the justices in a filing Thursday, asking the court to consider consolidating and expediting the pair of cases involving tariffs.Sept. 9, 2025, 3:12 p.m. ETKaroline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters during a news briefing that Trump directed his envoy Steve Witkoff to alert Qatar about Israel’s impending attack on Hamas officials Tuesday in Doha. But Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and an adviser to the prime minister, denied that the Qataris were informed about the attack before it took place. In a post on social media, he said the call from a U.S. official he did not identify came only as explosions were already being heard in the city.Sept. 9, 2025, 3:05 p.m. ETRepresentative Michael McCaul, below, Republican of Texas and the former chair of the House foreign affairs panel, said he has questions about Israel’s strike on Hamas in Qatar, including the claim from Hamas that its negotiators were targeted. He called Israel’s decision to carry out a strike in a third country “a pretty extraordinary move.”Senator Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho and the chair of the Senate foreign relations panel, said he was not concerned that the strike could lead to the two-year conflict spreading further in the Middle East. He called the strike “not surprising,” adding: “Any member of Hamas who had anything to do with the invasion of Israel is in jeopardy. It’s a given.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesSept. 9, 2025, 2:20 p.m. ETRepresentative James R. Comer, the Kentucky Republican who leads the Oversight Committee, said that he accepted the White House’s denial that President Trump was involved in a sexually suggestive note and drawing, addressed to Jeffrey Epstein, that appears to bear Trump’s signature.Comer, whose committee is leading an investigation into the federal government’s handling of the Epstein files, said he was not inclined to investigate the signature’s authenticity. He is currently leading an investigation into the legitimacy of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s signature on documents that were signed with an autopen.Sept. 9, 2025, 2:12 p.m. ETLeavitt was asked whether the president is considering offering Mayor Eric Adams of New York a job, perhaps as an enticement to drop out of the mayor’s race. She declined to answer directly, saying the president can address individual candidates, but that he’s made clear he doesn’t want to see a victory by Zohran Mamdani, whose politics she attacked.Sept. 9, 2025, 2:02 p.m. ETCredit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York TimesFor all of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s high-profile moves over the last few weeks, a new report from the “Make America Healthy Again” commission he leads released Tuesday arrived with little fanfare — or teeth.The White House commission report, which outlines strategies to combat childhood chronic disease, lands at a time when the health secretary has plunged the nation’s public health apparatus into chaos. It comes days after Mr. Kennedy testified before the Senate Finance Committee in a combative hearing, and about two weeks after he ousted the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The New York Times obtained a draft of the report in August. The final report is largely unchanged, and does not always clearly explain how the government will implement its recommendations.In the report, Mr. Kennedy has returned to his usual talking points: that American children are sick, stressed and screen-addicted, and that corporate interests and prescription medications are to blame. It is the clearest articulation yet of how the administration plans to carry out the aims of the MAHA movement.Yet even with the familiar rhetoric, the report is very likely to disappoint some corners of Mr. Kennedy’s MAHA coalition.It demonstrates both the ambitions and limits of his agenda. It stops short of calling for direct restrictions on pesticides and ultraprocessed foods, which Mr. Kennedy has called major threats. The strategy suggests collaboration — not confrontation — with the food and agriculture industries, saying that the government will back “precision agricultural techniques” to help farmers use less pesticides. After The Times reported on the draft, some members of the MAHA movement expressed frustration at what they saw as signs of Mr. Kennedy’s capitulations to these industries.The report points to a number of actions the Trump administration has already announced and branded victories, including establishing an infertility training center, cracking down on food dyes, relaunching the Presidential Fitness Test in public schools, studying the “root causes” of autism and working to define ultraprocessed foods and update the U.S. dietary guidelines.Other significant parts of the strategy are at odds with actions the administration has taken. For example, the report calls for providing “whole, healthy food” through the government-funded SNAP nutrition program for low-income Americans — but Mr. Trump signed legislation this year that significantly cut SNAP funding. It also suggests prioritizing research and analysis of the health effects of poor water and air quality, but the administration has abandoned major pollution regulations.There are also places where the report’s goals conflict with each other. For example, it says the government will “review new scientific information on the potential health risks of fluoride in drinking water,” but also identifies poor oral health and childhood cavities — which fluoride in drinking water helps prevent, according to decades of research — as potential causes of chronic disease. It says the C.D.C. will issue new recommendations on fluoride in water, which Mr. Kennedy has called dangerous despite the fact that most U.S. water supplies fall well within what scientists consider safe fluoride limits.The report contains a few bold ideas, but not always a clear path to implementing them. The document suggests the government will crack down on direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs, and calls for closing the so-called “GRAS” loophole, a provision that lets companies put new chemicals or ingredients into food products as long as they are “generally recognized as safe.” It also says the government will consider developing guidelines to limit the ways companies market “unhealthy” foods to children.In May, the commission released a report that blamed ultraprocessed foods, toxic chemicals and prescription drugs for fueling “the sickest generation in American history.” The May document cited studies that did not exist, and in some cases drew faulty conclusions from existing evidence.Tuesday’s 20-page document charges the government with “ensuring America has the best childhood vaccine schedule” at a time when Mr. Kennedy has named vaccine critics to a key vaccine advisory panel, overseen changes that restrict Americans’ access to Covid vaccines and seeded doubt about the safety and effectiveness of many shots. The report also calls for new research into vaccine injuries, a topic Mr. Kennedy has consistently brought up as he fuels suspicion around routine immunizations.It also says the government will create education campaigns aimed at improving fertility and will evaluate “overprescription trends” in the use of SSRIs, antipsychotics, stimulants and other mental health drugs for children.Though the report pushes for new research initiatives and public awareness campaigns, it does not include many specific policies. It says the government will commission a slew of new studies to better understand microplastics, air quality, the cumulative toll of chemicals and even electromagnetic radiation. It also says the surgeon general will start campaigns on educating children about the effects of screen time, vaping, cannabis and alcohol. (The current nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means, has not yet been confirmed.)It is not clear how the government might fund these initiatives. The Trump administration has made large cuts to scientific funding over the last few months.Mr. Kennedy and other members of the commission, including Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, and Dr. Marty Makary, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, are speaking at an event at 2 p.m. Eastern to release the report.Sept. 9, 2025, 2:01 p.m. ETAsked whether Trump cares about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, Leavitt said that he cares about “victims of all crimes.” But she called recent pushes by Democrats for more transparency part of a “hoax to smear the president of the United States.” She ignored a follow-up question about whether Trump plans to meet with Epstein’s victims. Later, she again called a birthday letter for Epstein, which contained what appears to be Trump’s signature, a fake.VideoCreditCredit...Associated PressSept. 9, 2025, 1:52 p.m. ETAsked about the Israeli strike targeting Hamas leaders in Doha on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, read a statement saying the administration was notified on Tuesday morning, before the bombing. She said President Trump told Steve Witkoff to inform the Qataris, who have been serving as mediators between Israel and Hamas, about the impending Israeli attack, “which he did.” She stressed that Qataris are friends of the U.S., and also said destroying Hamas was a “worthy” goal. She said the president made a number of calls to the region this morning, and that he disagreed with the location of the strike.Sept. 9, 2025, 1:38 p.m. ETRepublicans on the House Financial Services Committee just blocked an effort by Democrats to issue a subpoena to the Treasury Department for any of its records related to Jeffrey Epstein, including “suspicious activity reports” that are meant to alert law enforcement to potential criminal activities like sex trafficking.Though James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee, sent a letter requesting some of those documents, he has not yet issued a subpoena that would require they be delivered.Sept. 9, 2025, 1:33 p.m. ETKaroline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the president will commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks with a visit to the Pentagon on Thursday and then an appearance at a New York Yankees baseball game.Sept. 9, 2025, 1:01 p.m. ETRepresentative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, introduced a discharge petition last week to bring the bill calling for the release of the Epstein files to a vote on the House floor.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York TimesThe release this week of new information from the estate of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including a suggestive note to him apparently signed by Donald J. Trump, has not quieted the clamor on Capitol Hill for full transparency from the Justice Department about Mr. Epstein’s case.Despite staunch opposition from the White House and Republican leaders, a bipartisan resolution directing the Justice Department to release all of its investigative files on Mr. Epstein is still on track.Its proponents, Representatives Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, appear poised within weeks to draw enough backers to force action on the House floor, provided Democrats win special elections this month in districts where they are heavily favored.But while their effort is expected to continue being a political headache for Republican leaders and the White House, there is still no guarantee it will receive a vote, and little chance that the House would compel the Justice Department to comply even if it passed.Here’s how it works.A House majority can force action, even if leaders object.Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump administration officials had hoped they could thwart Mr. Massie and Mr. Khanna’s effort to force their measure to the floor.But Mr. Massie, a frequent Trump antagonist, is on the brink of drawing enough support from the House to move forward. Last week, he introduced what is known as a discharge petition, a maneuver that allows lawmakers to circumvent party leaders and bring a bill to the floor if 218 lawmakers demand it.By the time the House Oversight Committee investigating the handling of Mr. Epstein’s case released a 2003 drawing and note that appeared to contain Mr. Trump’s signature, the petition had 216 signatures. Just four are from Republican representatives: Mr. Massie and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.Mr. Johnson has made his opposition to the discharge petition explicit, and Mr. Massie has said that the White House has been pressuring lawmakers not to sign. Several Republicans who supported Mr. Massie’s resolution have withdrawn, and the effort to win more appeared to stall.But the two signatures that Mr. Massie needs could come later this month from newly elected Democrats, who are projected this month to win special elections in deep-blue districts to succeed lawmakers who died in office this year.James Walkinshaw is the favorite to win an election on Tuesday in a Northern Virginia district left vacant since May by the death of Representative Gerald E. Connolly, whom he served as chief of staff. Mr. Walkinshaw has promised to sign Mr. Massie’s discharge petition if he is elected.Two weeks later, Adelita Grijalva is expected to win a special election in a solidly Democratic district in Arizona to succeed her father, Representative Raul M. Grijalva, a 12-term congressman who died in March. She is also expected to join the rest of her party in signing Mr. Massie’s petition.A vote would be politically toxic for the G.O.P.Should both Democrats win and sign, Republican leaders would find themselves in a political jam as they continue to navigate competing demands from Mr. Trump.After his administration promised shocking revelations in the case, the president has weathered a backlash for its sudden reversal and refusal to make public its investigative files. He has condemned the continued fallout as a Democratic hoax, and lashed out at his own supporters for demanding more information on the investigation into Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in federal prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.If the measure were to pass, it is not clear whether the Republican-led Congress, which has deferred to Mr. Trump at every turn, would take any action if the Justice Department declined to comply with its demand for the files. That would require a separate vote to hold Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress.But a vote on whether to compel the release of the files would be politically painful for Republicans who have echoed the calls of constituents who have long clamored for the material. They would have to choose between backing the voters who elected them or backing Mr. Trump in his desire to keep the matter closed.Republican leaders are still trying avoid a vote.Even if the petition were to receive the requisite 218 signatures to force action, there is no guarantee it would proceed to the floor. House leaders have a range of procedural maneuvers they can use to thwart legislation even if it has the support of a majority of the House.The White House is also expected to continue trying to pressure the Republicans who have signed the discharge petition to remove their names. And Republican leaders have pointed to the Oversight Committee’s investigation and recent release of files as evidence that no vote by the full House is needed to assure transparency on the Epstein case.Sept. 9, 2025, 11:07 a.m. ETThe report and the recall were issued several months ago, at a time when Richard Grenell was negotiating the release of hostages in Venezuela.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesTulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, took the unusual step of ordering the National Security Agency to retract an intelligence report on Venezuela, according to people briefed on the matter.The report, which remains classified, described work on Venezuela by Richard Grenell, a former top intelligence official in the Trump administration who is now leading the Kennedy Center.News of the recall came amid a debate over the Trump administration’s policy toward the country. Mr. Grenell, who serves as an envoy to Venezuela, has advocated negotiations with its authoritarian government, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio has pushed for a more hard-line approach.But other officials said the recall of the report had little to do with competing camps in the Trump administration and was more about improperly identifying a senior official in an intelligence document.The report focused on Mr. Grenell’s conversations and negotiations with Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, according to a person familiar with the matter.The report and the recall were issued several months ago, at a time when Mr. Grenell was negotiating the return of undocumented immigrants to Venezuela, according to people briefed on the report.President Trump had appointed Mr. Grenell as an envoy to Venezuela and asked him to lead negotiations. Mr. Rubio was working on a different track on Venezuelan negotiations.The original report was circulated throughout the intelligence community. But more recently, the White House has ordered spy agencies to limit the number of people receiving intelligence on Venezuela.The National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies routinely retract reports when new information renders old ones erroneous or if mistakes are detected. But the unclassified note retracting the Venezuela report noted that the N.S.A. work remained sound.“The report is accurate and in accordance with all N.S.A. policy, directives and guidance; however, the D.N.I. directed N.S.A. to recall the report,” the recall notice said, referring to the director of national intelligence.Multiple people briefed on the matter insisted the report was recalled because it did not adequately hide Mr. Grenell’s identity, describing him as the presidential envoy to Venezuela. Ms. Gabbard has asked intelligence agencies to take special care with reports that either directly identify Trump administration officials or are written in ways that could easily identify them.During the first Trump administration, the issue of “unmasking” U.S. officials who were caught up in communications intercepts became a contentious issue. As a result, Ms. Gabbard has tried to avoid identifying Americans in intelligence reports out of concern for privacy and civil liberties, multiple U.S. officials said.Some administration officials said that making edits to intelligence reports is commonplace, adding that the N.S.A. document was later republished, stripping the identifying information from it. But other officials disputed that account and said there was no evidence an updated report was produced or circulated.The N.S.A. report appears to have included information about Mr. Grenell that was collected by the spy agency. It is not clear whether that involved conversations between two foreigners or conversations Mr. Grenell had directly with Mr. Maduro. The N.S.A. is not supposed to deliberately target the messages of Americans for surveillance, but it nevertheless collects communications involving or about Americans while targeting foreigners abroad.Mr. Grenell declined to comment. The National Security Agency and a White House official did not comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Grenell has been at odds with Mr. Rubio, who is also the national security adviser, over the Trump administration’s policy on Venezuela.Mr. Grenell has pushed for a deal-making approach that seeks reaching agreements with the Maduro government that could benefit American energy companies. Mr. Rubio has taken a much harder line, vetoing any energy deals, and supported the more militaristic approach the administration is currently pursuing with Venezuela.A deal to release hostages held in the country fell apart this year, after Mr. Grenell and Mr. Rubio’s State Department pursued separate deals. Mr. Grenell was pressing for an agreement that would have allowed American oil companies to do business in Venezuela. Chevron has been particularly interested in continuing its oil operations in Venezuela, a vital source of revenue for its authoritarian government. Mr. Rubio opposed that concession.Sept. 9, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ETDevlin Barrett and Nick CorasanitiDevlin Barrett reported from Washington, and Nick Corasaniti reported from New York.Poll workers at a Las Vegas voting site in November. A Justice Department official said all 50 states would eventually receive requests for voter roll data, according to notes of a meeting.Credit...Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesThe Justice Department is compiling the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally, according to people familiar with the matter.The effort to essentially establish a national voting database, involving more than 30 states, has elicited serious concerns among voting rights experts because it is led by allies of the president, who as recently as this January refused to acknowledge Joseph R. Biden Jr. fairly won the 2020 election. It has also raised worries that those same officials could use the data to revive lies of a stolen election, or try to discredit future election results.The initiative has proceeded along two tracks, one at the Justice Department’s civil rights division and another at its criminal division, seeking data about individual voters across the country, including names and addresses, in a move that experts say may violate the law. It is a significant break from decades of practice by Republican and Democratic administrations, which believed that doing so was federal overreach and ripe for abuse.“Nobody has ever done anything like this,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Marymount University’s law school and a former Justice Department official.The Justice Department has requested data from at least 16 Republican-controlled states, including Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. It has also sent more formal demands for data to at least 17 mostly Democrat-controlled or swing states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin and New York.Nearly every state has resisted turning over voter files with private, personally identifiable information on voters like driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers. Last week, a local judge blocked South Carolina from releasing private voter information to the Justice Department.In a private meeting with the staff of top state election officials last month, Michael Gates, a deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, disclosed that all 50 states would eventually receive similar requests, according to notes of the meeting reviewed by The New York Times. In particular, he said, the federal government wants the last four digits of every voter’s Social Security number.The administration plans to compare that voter data to a different database, maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, to see how many registered voters on the state lists match up with noncitizens listed by immigration agents, according to people familiar with the matter.Justin R. Erickson, the general counsel for Minnesota’s secretary of state, raised fears that the data would be used to further the administration’s own priorities. In a letter last month to the Justice Department, he wrote, “Equally concerning is the possibility that the D.O.J. will use the data inappropriately and the fact that the D.O.J. does not appear to have complied with the necessary legal requirements to obtain or use data on several million people.”Studies and state audits have found that noncitizen voting is essentially nonexistent.Mr. Levitt likened the effort to sending federal troops to bolster local police work. “It’s wading in, without authorization and against the law, with an overly heavy federal hand to take over a function that states are actually doing just fine,” he said, adding that “it’s wildly illegal, deeply troubling, and nobody asked for this.”In a statement, a Justice Department spokesman, Gates McGavick, said, “Enforcing the nation’s elections laws is a priority in this administration and in the civil rights division.”He cited longstanding voting laws like the National Voter Registration Act and the Civil Rights Act, saying that it gave the department leeway to obtain the data. Doing so will “ensure that states have proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections,” Mr. McGavick added.Already, the Justice Department has made extraordinary moves in the name of election integrity. It has unsuccessfully sought access to voting machines in Missouri and weighed the possibility of pursuing criminal investigations of state election officials over how they have done their jobs.A memo from the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities obtained by The Times detailed the request by the Justice Department to scrutinize equipment used in the 2020 election.The memo states that “Missouri is now part of a multistate attempt by the Department of Justice to access, physically inspect and perhaps take physical custody of election equipment used in the 2020 November general election.” At least two counties in the state received a request from Andrew McCoy Warner, a Justice Department official.The Missouri Independent earlier reported the requests for machines.A former state representative, Crystal Quade, submitting her ballot with her daughter in November in Springfield, Mo. The department has unsuccessfully sought access to voting machines in Missouri.Credit...Elizabeth Fryztak/Missourian, via Associated PressEmployees at the agency have been clear that they are interested in a central, federal database of voter information. In a letter to multiple states, Scott Laragy and Paul Hayden, two prosecutors from the criminal division, asked to “discuss a potential information-sharing agreement” that would help the department investigate election fraud.“With your cooperation, we plan to use this information to enforce federal election laws and protect the integrity of federal elections,” the lawyers wrote to election officials in Connecticut, according to records obtained by The Times. Multiple states, including Georgia and Nevada, received similar requests.While the department has sought to gather all the data itself, Trump administration officials have also offered some states a slightly different option. In conversations with at least two states, prosecutors from the civil rights division asked election officials to simply run their entire voter list through the federal database for citizenship records, known as the SAVE database, that is housed by the Department of Homeland Security.D.H.S. officials have also contacted election officials with a similar request, according to records obtained by The Times. North Carolina received a letter inviting it to the “soft launch” of a new functionality of the database using the last four digits of a Social Security number.Mr. Levitt said requests by the Justice Department for states to explain how they maintain voter lists were aboveboard. But what officials are demanding from many states goes so far beyond that, he said, that the moves may violate the Privacy Act, a post-Watergate law that carries criminal penalties and forbids the federal government from gathering certain types of information about citizens without stating beforehand the purpose of the data collection.When Mr. Gates, a top lawyer in the civil rights division, met with the staff of top state election officials, he said the purpose of collecting the data was to conduct tests and analysis to ensure total compliance with federal laws. He did not specify the type of test or analysis, though acknowledged that officials would be receptive to sharing more detail in conferring with individual states.Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state in Arizona, voiced unease in a statement responding to Justice Department requests. “Arizona voters deserve to participate in elections without fear that their personal information will be collected and stored in federal systems without proper legal safeguards or transparency,” he wrote, adding that the demands “raise serious legal and constitutional concerns.”Outside voting rights and good governance organizations expressed alarm that the moves signaled an overarching scheme by the Trump administration to interfere in the midterm elections.“The biggest structural concern is using this information in an irresponsible manner to fuel the narrative that something is amiss in any election in which the preferred outcome is not the actual outcome,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.Election officials also note that creating a federal database has its own complications. A state’s voter file is not a static document; new voter registrations, changes in address, deaths and other adjustments to voter rolls take place every day. A federal database would be out of date a day after any voter list was turned over to federal officials.Even as states are mostly responsible for overseeing voter rolls, the executive branch has tried in the past to do so, most notably during the first Trump administration.After the 2016 election, Mr. Trump created a commission charged with rooting out voter fraud, putting Kris Kobach, then the secretary of state in Kansas, in charge. But Mr. Kobach’s requests for sensitive voter information were nearly universally denied by election officials, and Mr. Trump abruptly shut down the commission in 2018.This March, Mr. Trump, who has falsely claimed his 2020 election defeat was the result of fraud, issued an executive order intended to force states to more aggressively examine its voter rolls.The order suggests that any states that fail to comply could face lawsuits, or lose federal funding.But almost every election official has steadfastly refused to hand over private data.“Nowhere does the Constitution provide the president or the executive branch with any independent power to control or otherwise conscript states to carry out nonstatutory policy priorities of the president,” Shirley Weber, the Democratic secretary of state in California, wrote to the department in August, adding, “My office is not obligated to follow along.”Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the commonwealth in Pennsylvania, wrote that the department’s requests “represent a concerning attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our country’s electoral process.” Mr. Schmidt, like the leaders of other states, offered the Justice Department publicly available voter files, but denied the request for more sensitive, private information from voters.Election experts and officials worry what else the Trump administration may try to do with the data. The Department of Government Efficiency tried to cross-reference various giant government data sets to accomplish a number of policy goals, including reviving false claims of extensive voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.At her confirmation hearing to become attorney general in January, Pam Bondi said she accepted “the result” of the 2020 election, but in the next breath suggested there were major problems with the vote.“I saw many things” in Pennsylvania, she said. She had gone to Pennsylvania after the election to amplify misleading claims of mass voter fraud, including helping arrange a news conference at a Philadelphia-area business, Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Around that time, she told Fox News that “we know that ballots have been dumped,” and that she had heard “people were receiving ballots that were dead.”In less than a year of the new administration, Mr. Levitt said, the Justice Department has burned so much of its credibility with the public and the courts that any of its findings under Ms. Bondi based on the voter roll data were unlikely to be persuasive.“Ask how many people are satisfied with what the Justice Department has done on the Jeffrey Epstein files,” he said. “It’s not just among liberals that they have lost credibility.”Sept. 8, 2025, 7:35 p.m. ETAfter the release of a lewd birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein containing what appeared to be Donald J. Trump’s signature, the White House called the document a fake.Taylor Budowich, the deputy chief of staff for communications, posted on social media several recent photos of the president’s signature to make the point.Time for @newscorp to open that checkbook, it’s not his signature. DEFAMATION! https://t.co/O6iKk4SYF5 pic.twitter.com/T0wlp36P9h— Taylor Budowich (@TayFromCA) September 8, 2025Mr. Trump’s wavy signature, once described as resembling a seismograph, has evolved over the years. But one distinct difference between the signatures on Mr. Budowich’s posts and the Epstein birthday card is that the birthday card has only a signed first name for Mr. Trump, something he has typically reserved for personal notes.Several letters that Mr. Trump wrote to New York City officials from 1987 through 2001 show him signing only his first name, and those signatures closely match the first-name only version of Mr. Trump’s signature on the Epstein note. One obvious similarity is that they all include a long tail following the final “d” of his first name. He has not typically included such a tail when signing with both his first and last names.The New York TimesThe New York Times obtained copies of the documents several years ago from the official New York City archives of Mayors Rudolph W. Giuliani and Edward I. Koch. The letters were retrieved during research for Times articles and for research for a book written by the Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig.The New York Times