Aug. 4, 2025, 1:01 p.m. ETA port in Mundra, India, in May 2024. President Trump said he would increase tariffs on the country over its purchases of Russian oil.Credit...Sumit Dayal/BloombergPresident Trump’s statement on social media Monday morning that he would be adding additional tariffs on India came after Indian officials over the weekend said the flow of cheap Russian oil would continue despite the pressure from the American president. One Indian official said that the government had “not given any direction to oil companies” to cut back imports from Russia after Mr. Trump last week announced a 25 percent tariff on India along with the threat of an additional unspecified penalty for purchasing Russian oil.After initial pressure from Washington and Europe in the early months of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, India thought it had convinced its Western allies on why it would continue purchasing Russian oil — so much so that American officials last year publicly declared India was working within a formula that was proving effective: Keep Russian oil flowing into the global supply but at a cheap enough price that it would shrink Russia’s revenue.“They bought Russian oil because we wanted somebody to buy Russian oil at a price cap; that was not a violation,” Eric Garcetti, the U.S. ambassador to New Delhi at the time, said last year. “It was actually the design of the policy.”India is now struggling to make sense of the sudden pressure from Mr. Trump on an issue that it considered settled. It is the latest irritant in a rapid unraveling of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-touted close relationship with Mr. Trump. Some officials and analysts saw the threat of an additional penalty as a manifestation of Mr. Trump’s frustration on the lack of progress on Ukraine. Others said it could be a pressure tactic for negotiations between the United States and India over a bilateral trade agreement.Another factor could be related to an issue that has caused annoyance in New Delhi in recent months: Mr. Trump’s claims that he ended a military escalation between India and Pakistan and is not getting proper credit for it. Mr. Modi’s government has pushed back against those claims to protect the Indian leader’s strongman image at home, saying Pakistan asked for a cease-fire under pressure of Indian military assault.Aug. 4, 2025, 11:04 a.m. ETPresident Trump doubled down on his threat to impose even larger tariffs on imports from India, warning on Truth Social that he will be raising it “substantially” as he claimed that India is profiting by re-selling cheap Russian oil on the open market. The U.S. imposed a 25 percent tariff on Indian imports last month. Indian officials have said they will continue to buy Russian crude.Aug. 4, 2025, 7:41 a.m. ETSteve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy for peace missions, is expected to travel to Russia this week.Credit...Maansi Srivastava for The New York TimesSteve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy for peace missions, may travel to Russia this week as the United States continues to press the Kremlin to agree to a peace deal in Ukraine, Mr. Trump said.Mr. Witkoff “may be going to Russia” on Wednesday or Thursday, the president told reporters late Sunday. The visit would come as Mr. Trump’s 10-day ultimatum nears for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to agree to a cease-fire in Ukraine or face U.S. sanctions.Asked what Mr. Witkoff’s message for Russia would be, Mr. Trump said: “We’ve got to get to a deal where people stop getting killed.”Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told Russian news agencies on Monday that it would “not rule out the possibility” of a meeting between Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Putin this week.Frustrated by deadly Russian attacks in Ukraine and a lack of progress on talks, Mr. Trump said on July 28 that he would give Moscow 10 to 12 days to end the conflict or face a new round of financial penalties. Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to punish Russia over its escalating attacks in Ukraine but so far has not followed through.Asked late Sunday what would happen if Russia does not agree to end the war by his deadline, Mr. Trump said: “Well, there will be sanctions, but they seem to be pretty good at avoiding sanctions.”Mr. Trump began his presidency with overtures to Mr. Putin, claiming that Ukraine had provoked Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 and that Moscow wanted the war to end.Although he initially welcomed Washington’s mediation efforts with Ukraine, Mr. Putin has been dragging his feet on a number of cease-fire offers. He has also suggested counterproposals or insisted that a simple cease-fire would not resolve the underlying causes of the conflict as Moscow sees them.Mr. Putin has not directly responded to the White House’s ultimatum, but has said that people who are disappointed with the lack of quick progress toward a peace deal have “inflated expectations.”Russian and Ukrainian officials last met briefly in Istanbul in July for talks aimed at ending their war, but made little headway.Mr. Putin is open to direct talks with Ukraine and would be willing to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, if all Russian preconditions for the meeting are met, Mr. Peskov told reporters on Monday, repeating a familiar Kremlin assertion.The Kremlin is unlikely to halt hostilities immediately, observers say, as Russian troops are waging a summer offensive in Ukraine and have been making territorial gains. Meanwhile, Ukraine has been struggling with delays in arms shipments and insufficient combat troops.In another sign of his frustrations with Russia, Mr. Trump said on Friday that he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be repositioned in response to social media threats from Dmitri Medvedev, Russia’s former president. It was unclear whether any submarines had changed position.Aug. 4, 2025, 5:02 a.m. ETCathy A. Harris was fired without cause from the Merit Systems Protection Board and has enlisted the Washington Litigation Group in her appeals process.Credit...ReutersCathy A. Harris learned she was fired for a third time during her daughter’s high school graduation. It was a gut punch, she said, on what was meant to be a happy occasion.The former chairwoman of an obscure but critical panel that mediates federal employee discipline, Ms. Harris was among an early slate of federal employees President Trump fired without cause. She sued the administration and went through four months of employment limbo before the Supreme Court ordered that she remain fired while her case wound through the legal system.“Right now, I’m really laser-focused on getting my case to a win, however long it takes,” Ms. Harris said in a recent interview.As she carves a path expected to lead back to the Supreme Court, she has added a new law firm to her team of lawyers. The four-lawyer firm, called the Washington Litigation Group, is the latest to join a coterie of pro bono organizations that have emerged in recent months to challenge the Trump administration, which is already facing about 375 lawsuits, according to The Times’s latest count.The firm plans to focus on clients with cases likely headed to the appeals process with the potential to set precedents strengthening civil service protections and reining in executive power. Two of its lawyers, James I. Pearce and Mary Dohrmann, even share Ms. Harris’s experience of being fired by Mr. Trump. Mr. Pearce and Ms. Dohrmann were fired from the Justice Department in January because of their work on Jack Smith’s special counsel team investigating Mr. Trump.The new group aims to bring appellate expertise to the very beginning of a client’s case, an approach that its founders say will improve the odds of making a successful argument before the Supreme Court.It’s a game plan straight out of the Big Law playbook. But when many large firms receded from this type of work to avoid drawing Mr. Trump’s wrath, it created a void.“Our purpose is to help fill that gap,” said Peter Keisler, one of eight members on the firm’s steering committee.“We’ve just never before seen this kind of systematic effort by a government to use all possible levers of government power against perceived opponents,” said Mr. Keisler, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society and a former assistant attorney general and acting attorney general for President George W. Bush. The firm is applying for tax-exempt status and is seeking donations from foundation and donors. It has received some initial funding to cover the salaries of the four lawyers, a spokesman said.The left-leaning group Democracy Forward, one of the biggest nonprofits fighting the Trump administration, has also recognized the gap in appellate expertise. The group is opening its own appellate shop this week, designed to mirror those at the big law firms, and has already hired more than a dozen lawyers, said Skye Perryman, the group’s president. The group is funded by foundations and donations.The shift in pro bono representation is subtle but potentially significant in the legal challenges against Mr. Trump’s assertions of executive power, including the ability to carry out mass and targeted firings of civil servants and the elimination of federal programs authorized by Congress.Now is a natural time to start thinking more about appeals, said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a professor at Stanford Law School, where he is a director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.“Once the cases get up to the appellate level, that’s when people start to think about which one is going to have the right timing and package of arguments and facts that’s going to be well positioned” for a hearing before the Supreme Court, Mr. Fisher said.The appeals-focused model was intriguing to Mr. Pearce, one of the firm’s four lawyers who was previously a longtime Justice Department prosecutor. Last year, Mr. Pearce presented the government’s argument in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia against Mr. Trump’s claim that he was immune from charges of plotting to subvert the 2020 election. He was among more than a dozen Justice Department lawyers who worked on the two criminal investigations into Mr. Trump who were fired in January.Mr. Pearce is disputing the firing at the Merit Systems Protection Board, the federal employee discipline panel that Ms. Harris served on before her own termination.“I think that a lot of the fighting will be on the scope and extent of a president’s Article II powers,” Mr. Pearce said, referring to powers outlined in the Constitution. “You see this in the independent board cases. You certainly see it, I think, in my firing and in the firing of other civil servants.”Those powers are at the heart of the case pursued by Ms. Harris, who argues that the president did not have the authority to fire a member of a congressionally mandated independent board without cause. She said her challenge, as she waits for a decision from the federal appeals court in Washington, was not simply about getting her job back.“It’s about much bigger principles of democracy and the balance of powers,” she said.Seamus Hughes and Cam Baker contributed research.Aug. 3, 2025, 11:05 a.m. ETKevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, declined to give evidence to substantiate the president’s claims that economic data had been manipulated.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesPresident Trump said on Sunday that he would announce a new commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics “over the next three, four days” after he fired the head of the agency last week over a gloomy jobs report.Mr. Trump fired the top labor official in charge of compiling statistics on employment, Erika McEntarfer, on Friday after the B.L.S. released monthly jobs data showing a significant slowdown in hiring. Mr. Trump accused Ms. McEntarfer, without evidence, of rigging the numbers.Ms. McEntarfer had worked as a government economist for decades and was confirmed by the Senate in a bipartisan vote last year. Mr. Trump gave no further details about the announcement of her replacement.Earlier Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, insisted that the administration was “absolutely not” shooting the messenger on the heels of the jobs report.Mr. Hassett repeatedly declined to furnish detailed evidence that would substantiate the president’s claims that the data had been manipulated to hurt him politically.“The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Mr. Hassett told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” explaining at one point that the president sought to ensure jobs numbers could be “trusted.”In a second appearance, on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hassett claimed there were “partisan patterns” in the jobless data, and said that “data can’t be propaganda.”Since Ms. McEntarfer’s sudden dismissal, economists across the political spectrum have offered a more worrisome assessment, warning that Mr. Trump’s actions threaten to pollute the nonpartisan work at B.L.S. to measure the trajectory of the economy.Her dismissal came only hours after the statistics agency reported the slowdown in hiring in July, on top of two substantial downward revisions to its previous estimates of job growth in May and June.While the revision was large, such updates are not out of the ordinary, though Mr. Trump still claimed on social media that the numbers “were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”“So you know what I did?” Mr. Trump later told reporters, “I fired her, and you know what? I did the right thing.”Mr. Trump also pointed to past revisions to the jobs data, specifically a report last August that showed employers added roughly 818,000 fewer jobs over a 12-month period than previously believed. Mr. Trump claimed the revision was made “right after the election,” though it actually occurred about two and a half months before the vote.In his appearance on Fox, Mr. Hassett once again cited that “massive revision” as a source of concern and suspicion, this time saying it came “after Joe Biden had dropped out,” referring to former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.“When the data are unreliable, when they keep being revised all over the place, then there are going to be people that wonder if there’s a partisan pattern in the data,” he said.Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.