Trump Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Resume Nuclear Talks as Risk of War Looms - The New York Times

Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Resume Nuclear Talks as Risk of War Looms

Feb. 26, 2026, 10:51 a.m. ET8 minutes ago

The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford departing from Crete on Thursday to make its way toward the Middle East.Costas Metaxakis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

What We’re Covering Today

• "Iran: Officials from the United States and Iran began another high-stakes round of nuclear talks in Geneva on Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said. Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, who is mediating the talks, said the sides were “exchanging creative and positive ideas.” The outcome could determine whether they go to war or strike a deal. The U.S. has built up a massive military presencearound the Middle East and near Iran’s borders, while Iran has vowed retaliation if attacked. Read more ›

• Epstein Files: Hillary Clinton is set to appear in front of a House committee for a closed-door deposition as part of its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender with whom her husband, former President Bill Clinton, once associated. Though Mrs. Clinton had no dealings with Mr. Epstein, she is once again under pressure to answer for the actions of her husband.

Feb. 26, 2026, 10:42 a.m. ET

Democratic leaders in the House say they plan to force a vote on a war powers resolution which would require the president to seek authorization from Congress before carrying out military strikes in Iran. The resolution is expected to face bipartisan resistance, as a number of Democrats have already come out against it. 

“We maintain that any such action would be unconstitutional without consultation with and authorization from Congress,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement signed by fellow Democratic leaders.

Feb. 26, 2026, 9:37 a.m. ET

Erika Solomon and Farnaz Fassihi

Mediated talks involving Iranian and American negotiators in Geneva have paused as the sides break to consult with their capitals, according to two officials involved in the discussions. Esmail Baghaei, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, said negotiations would reconvene at 5:30 p.m. local time, or 11:30 a.m. Eastern. The pause suggests the sides’ representatives feel enough has been raised to warrant continuing the negotiations later in the day.

The United States and Iran began high-stakes nuclear talks in Geneva on Thursday that could determine whether the two countries go to war or strike a deal.

Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, who is mediating the talks, said the two sides were “exchanging creative and positive ideas,” and would resume again after a break. “We hope to make more progress,” he wrote in a post on social media.

Feb. 26, 2026, 10:51 a.m. ET

Speaking to reporters ahead of Hillary Clinton’s deposition, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, appeared defensive about why the committee was investigating Clinton, a Democrat who has said she never met or spoke to Jeffrey Epstein. He noted that Democrats on the committee had voted to hold the Clintons in contempt if they did not appear to testify. He also reiterated his claim that Hillary Clinton was of interest to the committee because Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime companion of Epstein, attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. 

Feb. 26, 2026, 10:18 a.m. ET

Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is expected to speak to the news media ahead of Hillary Clinton’s closed-door deposition, which is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. Eastern. The committee called Clinton as part of its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, with whom her husband, former President Bill Clinton, once associated.

The deposition, which is being held behind closed doors at a performing arts center in Chappaqua, N.Y., near the Clintons’ home, comes after a monthslong battle during which the Clintons tried to fight the congressional subpoenas forcing them to testify. They argued that the purpose was to harass and embarrass them and distract from President Trump’s involvement and handling of the Epstein files.

News Analysis

It was Jan. 26, 1992, and Hillary Clinton was seated on a couch next to her husband, answering probing, personal questions about her marriage after a former local newscaster from Arkansas, Gennifer Flowers, claimed she had a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton.

Mr. Clinton, then a young governor running for president, did most of the talking in that now-famous “60 Minutes” interview. But it was Mrs. Clinton’s feisty, defensive response to the crisis that was credited with saving her husband’s campaign and career — and cementing her complicated place in the national consciousness for the next three decades.

The Trump administration’s proposed new rules for Obamacare plans next year would shift more health care costs to Americans, with much higher deductibles that could lead to greater medical bills.

Under the proposal, people who rely on the Affordable Care Act for their health insurance coverage could choose plans with much lower monthly premiums. But that could leave them exposed to medical expenses totaling thousands of dollars more than A.C.A. plans do now before their insurance would kick in.

A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday found that the Trump administration’s policy of summarily deporting immigrants to so-called third countries — nations other than their countries of origin — is unlawful.

In an 81-page ruling, Judge Brian E. Murphy of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote that the government must first try to deport detained immigrants to their home countries — or to countries designated by an immigration judge when the immigrants were ordered removed from the country. After that process, immigration detainees must be given “meaningful notice” before being deported to another country, to allow them the opportunity to raise any fears they have that they might be persecuted or tortured there.

Representative Ilhan Omar on Wednesday condemned the arrest of a guest she brought to the State of the Union, saying that being charged with a crime for standing up in the gallery during the president’s address “sends a chilling message about the state of our democracy.”

Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen who was dragged from her vehicle after an ICE agent shattered its window during President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, attended the president’s speech on Tuesday night at the invitation of Ms. Omar. As Mr. Trump was speaking, Ms. Rahman was seen being escorted from the gallery above the House floor by Capitol Police officers. She could be heard shouting for someone to call Ms. Omar, and that all she had done was stand up.

Trump administration officials announced on Wednesday that the federal government would withhold $259 million in Medicaid funds to Minnesota, the latest effort by the federal government to pull funding from Democratic-led states as President Trump rails against a major welfare fraud scandal there.

Federal judges have blocked most of the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back funds from states like Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois and Colorado. The states have decried the cuts as politically motivated, adding that they would harm hundreds of thousands of people. The Trump administration has pointed to allegations of fraud to justify the cuts.

About 10 F.B.I. employees, some veteran agents, were dismissed this week for their work on the investigation into President Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his residence in Florida, according to five people with knowledge of the move.

The firings are part of a rolling barrage of retribution aimed at those who worked on the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump after his first term in office. They came hours after Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, told Reuters that as part of the documents inquiry, the bureau had subpoenaed phone metadata for himself and Susie Wiles, currently the White House chief of staff."

Trump Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Resume Nuclear Talks as Risk of War Looms - The New York Times

BREAKING: FBI fires 7 tied to Trump classified docs case, sources tell MS NOW

 

Supreme Court says US Postal Service can't be sued | AP News

Supreme Court rules the Postal Service can’t be sued, even when mail is intentionally not delivered

"WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that Americans can’t sue the U.S. Postal Service, even when employees deliberately refuse to deliver mail.

By a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled against a Texas landlord, Lebene Konan, who alleges her mail was intentionally withheld for two years. Konan, who is Black, claims racial prejudice played a role in postal employees’ actions.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for a majority of five conservative justices, said the federal law that generally shields the Postal Service from lawsuits over missing, lost and undelivered mail includes “the intentional nondelivery of mail.”

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that while the protection against lawsuits is broad, it does not extend to situations when the decision not to deliver mail “was driven by malicious reasons.” Justice Neil Gorsuch joined his three liberal colleagues in dissent.

President Donald Trump’s Republican administration had warned that a ruling for Konan would have led to a flood of similar lawsuits against the cash-strapped Postal Service.

Konan, who’s also a real estate agent and an insurance agent, claims two employees at a post office in Euless, Texas, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, deliberately didn’t deliver mail belonging to her and her tenants because, she alleges, they didn’t like that she is Black and owns multiple properties.

Related Stories

According to court documents, the dispute began when Konan discovered the mailbox key for one of her rental properties had been changed without her knowledge, preventing her from collecting and distributing tenants’ mail from the box. When she contacted the local post office, she was told she wouldn’t receive a new key or regular delivery until she proved she owned the property. She did so, the documents say, but the mail problems continued, despite the USPS inspector general instructing the mail to be delivered.

Konan alleges the employees marked some of the mail as undeliverable or return to sender. Konan and her tenants failed to receive important mail such as bills, medications and car titles, according to the lawsuit. Konan also claims she lost rental income because some tenants moved out due to the situation.

After filing dozens of complaints with postal officials, Konan finally filed a lawsuit under the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows some lawsuits against the government. The case focused on the reach of the special postal exemption to the law

Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court."

Supreme Court says US Postal Service can't be sued | AP News

Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump - The New York Times

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Documents released by the Justice Department briefly mention a woman’s unverified accusation that Donald J. Trump assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was a minor. But several memos related to her account are not in the files.

Feb. 25, 2026

When the Justice Department made files public late last month, officials said it included all material sent by the public to the F.B.I.Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

The vast trove of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein failed to include some key materials related to a woman who made an accusation against President Trump, according to a review by The New York Times.

The materials are F.B.I. memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.

The existence of the memos was revealed in an index listing the investigative materials related to her account, which was publicly released. According to that index, the F.B.I. conducted four interviews in connection with her claims and wrote summaries about each one. But only one summary of the four interviews, which describes her accusations against Mr. Epstein, was released by the Justice Department. The other three are missing.

The public files also do not include the underlying interview notes, which the index also indicates are part of the file. The Justice Department released similar interview notes in connection to F.B.I. interviews with other potential witnesses and victims.

It is unclear why the materials are missing. The Justice Department said in a statement to The Times on Monday that “the only materials that have been withheld were either privileged or duplicates.” In a new statement on Tuesday, the department also noted that documents could have been withheld because of “an ongoing federal investigation.” Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.

The woman’s description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump in the 1980s is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the president, that are contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.

When the files were made public late last month, officials described the trove as including all material sent by the public to the F.B.I. “Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement at the time, calling such claims “unfounded and false.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. In a statement on Tuesday, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said Mr. Trump had “been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”

A lawyer who previously represented the woman in a lawsuit against Mr. Epstein’s estate declined to comment.

The missing records deepen questions about how the Justice Department has handled the release of the Epstein files, which was mandated by a law signed by Mr. Trump last year after bipartisan congressional pressure.

Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, addressing reporters after the Justice Department released more Epstein files last month.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

Under the law, the Justice Department can redact material that could be used to identify Mr. Epstein’s victims, depicted violence or child sexual abuse, or would hurt a continuing federal investigation. But the law expressly prohibited federal officials from withholding or redacting materials “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity” to public figures.

Some lawmakers and survivors of Mr. Epstein’s abuse have strongly condemned the department for how it handled redactions, noting that details identifying some victims were left exposed and nude photographs of young women were included in the public release, while material related to claims of abuse by other men had been heavily redacted.

The woman who made the accusation about Mr. Trump came forward in July 2019, days after federal investigators arrested Mr. Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, according to records in the public files of tips the F.B.I. received during that period. She claimed that she had been repeatedly assaulted by Mr. Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s, according to a summary of an F.B.I. interview with her on July 24, 2019.

The F.B.I. did three subsequent interviews to assess her account in August and October 2019 and made a summary of each interview, according to the index of records compiled in the case. But the memos describing those three interviews were not publicly released.

The public files do contain a 2025 description of her account, as well as other accusations against prominent men contained in the documents. In that 2025 memo, federal officials wrote that the woman had said that Mr. Epstein introduced her to Mr. Trump, and that she claimed Mr. Trump had assaulted her in a violent and lurid encounter. The documents say the alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation.

The Times’s examination of a set of serial numbers on the individual pages in the public files suggests that more than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files. The missing materials were reported earlier by the journalist Roger Sollenberger on Substack and by NPR.

Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that when he reviewed unredacted versions of the Epstein files at the Justice Department on Monday, interview summaries related to the woman’s claim were also missing from that trove.

“Documents that are listed, which should be included, which are referenced in other documents, are not in the files,” Mr. Garcia said. He added that the Justice Department had also not provided them to the Oversight Committee, which issued a subpoena last year for all of the Justice Department’s investigative material regarding Mr. Epstein.

Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that interview summaries related to the woman’s claim were also missing from a trove of unredacted files he reviewed on Monday.Heather Diehl/Getty Images

Mr. Garcia said the Justice Department had not provided a proper explanation for why the materials were missing. Democrats plan to open a separate investigation into why the documents are not available.

In the sole summary of the F.B.I. interview that was released, the woman told investigators that she did not know Mr. Epstein’s full identity until 2019, when a friend sent her a photograph of Mr. Epstein. She said she then recognized the person who she said had raped her.

The woman told the agents she still had the photo on her phone, and they noted that it was a widely distributed photo of Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump, according to the document. She gave the agents permission to take a photograph of the image but asked them to crop out Mr. Trump. When asked why, her lawyer interjected that the woman “was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation,” according to the F.B.I. memo.

It is unclear exactly what F.B.I. agents learned about her claims related to Mr. Trump in their three subsequent interviews.

The woman spent most of the interview on July 24, 2019, describing in detail what she said were repeated violent assaults by Mr. Epstein that she had endured, as reported earlier by The Post and Courier. She said that as a teenager in South Carolina, she was asked to babysit at a house on Hilton Head Island. But after she arrived, there were no children to babysit, and only a man she came to know as Jeff who she said plied her with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. She described him raping her on multiple occasions.

The woman joined a lawsuit later in 2019 against Mr. Epstein’s estate. She subsequently dropped her claim. Court records do not indicate if she received any financial settlement. A court record from 2021 said she was separately deemed ineligible for compensation from a fund set up for Epstein victims, but it did not specify why.

Julie Tate and Dylan Freedman contributed reporting.

Mike Baker is a national investigative reporter for The Times, based in Seattle.

Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight."

Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump - The New York Times

Very poorly done cover up’: Bombshell report on how DOJ withheld Trump related Epstein Files

 

Epstein BOMBSHELL rocks Trump WH: DOJ under fire for HIDING ‘Trump files’

 

 

John Roberts Is Losing Patience With Trump

Feb. 24, 2026

Pool photo by Chip Somodevilla

By Linda Greenhouse

“Ms. Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008.

Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t waste words.

His majority opinion in last week’s tariff ruling was, characteristically, a model of succinctness. In a mere 21 pages (Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, by contrast, clocked in at 46 pages, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissent at 63), he explained why, as a matter of statutory interpretation and the constitutional separation of powers, President Trump lacked the authority he had claimed, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to impose a hodgepodge of tariffs on countries all over the world.

There was, however, one exception to the opinion’s conciseness: a meaty paragraph describing the roller-coaster course of Mr. Trump’s tariff regime. Here, with citations to seven separate executive orders omitted for the sake of readability, is the chief justice’s account:

Since imposing each set of tariffs, the president has issued several increases, reductions and other modifications. One month after imposing the 10 percent drug trafficking tariffs on Chinese goods, he increased the rate to 20 percent. One month later, he removed a statutory exemption for Chinese goods under $800. Less than a week after imposing the reciprocal tariffs, the president increased the rate on Chinese goods from 34 percent to 84 percent. The very next day, he increased the rate further still, to 125 percent. This brought the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145 percent. The president has also shifted sets of goods into and out of the reciprocal tariff framework ([e.g.] exempting from reciprocal tariffs beef, fruits, coffee, tea, spices and some fertilizers). And he has issued a variety of other adjustments ([e.g.] extending “the suspension of heightened reciprocal tariffs” on Chinese imports).

For all the attention the decision in this case, Learning Resources v. Trump, has received, this paragraph has gone largely unremarked. I understand why; it’s unnecessary to the opinion’s argument. If, as a matter of law, the tariffs are invalid, it doesn’t matter whether they were imposed sensibly or capriciously. The paragraph is, in a word, gratuitous, something that can rarely be said about a passage in a Roberts opinion. So what is it doing there?

The answer, I think, is that the chief justice is sending a message, not necessarily or not only to Mr. Trump but to the waiting world. Something along the lines of: “People, this is what we’re dealing with.” The point being not that “some fertilizers” are now exempt from reciprocal tariffs, but that a reckless president is sowing chaos in America and around the globe.

We don’t need to know Chief Justice Roberts’s innermost thoughts about Mr. Trump — whatever they were before the president, in reaction to the tariff decision, described him and his majority as “fools” and “lap dogs” swayed “by foreign interests” — to discern his exasperation.

For the past year, the Trump administration has trolled the Supreme Court, sending up one emergency application after another to demand temporary relief from adverse lower-court rulings. The administration frequently got what it wanted: a stay of the ruling while an appeal proceeded. Powerful dissenting opinions from the three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, made sure the public knew that these orders, while making no law, had the real-world effect of enabling the president to carry out his agenda, including slashing the federal work force and gutting lifesaving foreign assistance programs. Chief Justice Roberts was usually in the majority on these unsigned and generally unexplained orders; obviously he thought the stays were called for. But he probably isn’t happy with the drip-drip-drip of public perception — reflected in polls and social media chatter — that the court was handing the president a blank check.

Something different happened in late December when the justices denied the administration’s request for a stay of a district-court decision barring its use of the National Guard in Illinois. The order was unsigned, with Justices Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting. The three-page order essentially made new law by narrowly defining the circumstances under which a president could federalize a state’s National Guard.

This was a very big deal. The president promptly acceded to the order, removing the federalized Guard from Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., as well as Chicago. Yet the court’s action, coming on the day before Christmas Eve, received far less attention than the tariff case. In discussions about the court today, few people even seem to remember it. It is as if the view of the court as the administration’s lackey was so entrenched that evidence to the contrary was too discordant to be fully absorbed.

The tariff decision was the first of the court’s rulings, after full briefing and oral argument, on the merits of one of the second Trump administration’s cases. A decision on the administration’s effort to fire a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors may be next. In that case, the administration claims sufficient cause to dismiss a Fed governor, Lisa Cook, based on assertions it claims she made in mortgage agreements. During oral argument, Chief Justice Roberts seemed to recoil from the overwrought tone of Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s argument, which began with, “Deceit or gross negligence by a financial regulator in financial transactions is cause for removal,” even though there has been no judicial finding that Ms. Cook engaged in either.

“You began by talking about deceit,” Chief Justice Roberts said to Mr. Sauer. “Does what you said after that apply in the case of an inadvertent mistake contradicted by other documents in the record?” Mr. Sauer’s answer, “We would say yes,” hung unsatisfactorily in the air as the argument proceeded for the next two hours.

It’s worth remembering that Chief Justice Roberts is the head of the entire judicial branch. It is in that capacity that his vexation with Mr. Trump verges on acute concern. The president has denounced judges who have ruled against him, including by calling for a Federal District Court judge’s impeachment. Mr. Trump has helped create an atmosphere in which judges appropriately fear for their personal safety and that of their families. Many people expected the chief justice to address this issue directly in his year-end report in December, but he did not. In two decades as the nation’s top jurist, he has at times spoken directly in defense of the judiciary, as in his 2024 report. But these occasions have been infrequent, as if the only messages this notably self-possessed and buttoned-down man cares to send are those his opinions deliver.“

Opinion | Trump’s New Tariffs Are Illegal Too - The New York Times

Trump’s New Tariffs Are Illegal Too

Feb. 24, 2026

Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times

By Lev Menand and Joel Michaels

Mr. Menand is the author of “The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis.” Mr. Michaels served as a senior adviser in the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s use of an international emergency powers statute to impose broad tariffs on imports from across the world.

He immediately announced that he was relying on a different statute — the Trade Act of 1974 — to impose new, near-universal 10 percent tariffs, which he then raised to 15 percent.

These new tariffs are illegal, too. They are just another attempt by the president to ignore the law and dare the courts to stop him.

Courts should put a halt to the new tariffs — before they disrupt global trade and the domestic economy.

The never-used provision the White House is relying on, Section 122, says that the president shall impose tariffs or import restrictions, for up to 150 days, whenever “fundamental international payments problems require” restricting imports to deal with, among other things, “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits.” Mr. Trump has seized on this language, pointing primary to America’s substantial and persistent trade deficit (around $900 billion last year).

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But the president misreads the statute. The provision is not about trade imbalances. Other parts of the statute address those. It is about financial imbalances — in particular ones that threaten financial stability.

The text and context of the law is clear: A Section 122 “payments problem” involves a flight from the U.S. dollar. At the moment, no such problem exists.

The president’s own lawyers essentially admitted as much months ago. In a filing in the earlier case, the Justice Department acknowledged that “trade deficits are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits,” citing the congressional history. And they suggested that Section 122 did not give the president the authority to impose tariffs to address trade deficits. (Section 122 does not “have any obvious application” where the concerns “arise from trade deficits,” the Justice Department’s lawyers wrote.)

To further appreciate how badly the president is misreading the law, it is necessary to place this particular statute in the context of the early 1970s. At that time, the United States was still engaged in a postwar effort to manage currency flows between countries. Under the Bretton Woods agreement, reached in 1944, the U.S. dollar was fixed to gold, at $35 per ounce, and other major currencies were convertible to it at fixed exchange rates.

Throughout the 1960s, the U.S. faced a “balance-of-payments deficit”: Too many overseas holders of dollars sought to convert them into gold. As the government’s official gold reserves were depleted, these dynamics accelerated, making it harder to keep the currency peg in place.

In 1971, an acute increase in this deficit caused a payments problem. The Bretton Woods system unraveled. President Richard Nixon closed the so-called gold window that enabled conversion of dollars to gold. The value of the dollar plummeted. To prevent a further collapse, Nixon imposed a temporary 10 percent import surcharge on goods entering the United States. The idea was that reducing imports could help stanch one source of short-term dollar outflows.

The tariff was litigated, and the courts initially held it illegal. In response, Congress drafted a law to provide explicit, narrow authority to impose such import restrictions and surcharges in response to immediate negative shocks to the foreign exchange market: Section 122. Even though Bretton Woods was in shambles, the U.S. was still nominally bound by the old international agreements. And many policymakers thought that the country might return to a system of fixed or flexible exchange rates. Authority like Section 122 was seen as needed to keep such a system stable.

Lawmakers were also concerned about a new international payments problem that had just emerged. In 1973 and 1974, the price of oil skyrocketed. Oil-producing states accumulated enormous wealth denominated in American currency. They parked these so-called petrodollars in bank accounts in Europe, outside U.S. regulators’ control. Just six months before the Trade Act was passed, one highly leveraged German bank collapsed, inciting fears of an international payments-based financial crisis.

These concerns are reflected in the text of Section 122. Alongside the “balance-of-payments deficits,” lawmakers listed “imminent and significant depreciation of the dollar in foreign exchange markets” and “an international balance-of-payments disequilibrium.” And lawmakers explicitly distinguished between trade imbalances and payments problems, such as the rapid movement of petrodollars.

The rest of the provision makes clear that Mr. Trump’s reading is untenable. Section 122 actually requires the president to implement tariffs or quotas — or else to notify and consult with congressional leaders — when there are “fundamental international payments problems.” If the current circumstances meet this definition of a fundamental problem, why didn’t Mr. Trump notify congressional leaders already? Shouldn’t he have told them that we were facing a payments crisis and explain why he was not implementing tariffs under Section 122?

While the statute does not expressly define a “fundamental international payments problem,” under Mr. Trump’s interpretation (including his gesturing at the volume of U.S. financial assets held abroad), we have had such a problem for decades. Given the structure of Section 122, that cannot be right.

As the Supreme Court noted in its opinion last week, the framers gave Congress “alone … access to the pockets of the people.” They did not vest “any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch.”

The president needs legal authority to impose his new tariffs, and Section 122 offers him none. This is a clear case — even more so than the case decided last week.

When affected parties challenge the new levies in the coming days, the courts should step in and put a halt to the levies. The president has replaced one set of illegal tariffs with another."

Opinion | Trump’s New Tariffs Are Illegal Too - The New York Times

Training for New ICE Agents Is ‘Deficient’ and ‘Broken,’ Whistle-Blower Says - The New York Times

Training for New ICE Agents Is ‘Deficient’ and ‘Broken,’ Whistle-Blower Says

"The former official appeared with congressional Democrats, who also released documents indicating significant reductions in instructional hours for recruits.

Feb. 23, 2026

“For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program,” Ryan Schwank told congressional Democrats on Monday.Kenny Holston/The New York Times

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official who resigned this month from his job instructing new recruits came forward on Monday as a whistle-blower, describing what he said was a “deficient, defective and broken” training program with a pared-back curriculum as the Trump administration races to expand the agency.

The account by Ryan Schwank, a former ICE lawyer who worked at the federal government’s law enforcement training academy, coincided with the release by Senate Democrats of several dozen pages of internal ICE records that suggest the Trump administration has curtailed the agency’s basic training.

“For the last five months, I watched ICE dismantle the training program,” Mr. Schwank said at a forum held in Washington by congressional Democrats. “Cutting 240 hours of vital classes from a 584-hour program — classes that teach the Constitution, our legal system, firearms training, the use of force, lawful arrests, proper detention and the limits of officers’ authority.”

He added: “New cadets are graduating from the academy despite widespread concerns among training staff that even in the final days of training, the cadets cannot demonstrate a solid grasp of the tactics or the law required to perform their jobs.”

Some of the previously unreported documents released on Monday indicate that ICE officers are now training for significantly fewer hours than they did before President Trump’s hiring surge. Others suggest that several training classes appear to have been cut from the required syllabus, including one titled “Use of Force Simulation Training” and others on immigration law and ICE’s legal authorities.

Together, the new disclosures underscore concerns about the conduct and preparedness of Homeland Security Department agents, who have shot and killed at least three American citizens over the last year. Mr. Trump’s decision to order immigration officers into major American cities has led to a rise in violent encounters with members of the public, leading to fears that poor training for new agents will produce more chaos.

Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the department, said in a statement that training hours had not been reduced, adding, “Our officers receive extensive firearm training, are taught de-escalation tactics, and receive Fourth and Fifth Amendment comprehensive instruction.”

Mr. Schwank was hired as an ICE lawyer in 2021 and became an instructor last year at the federal government’s law enforcement training academy in Georgia, where he taught courses on the law. He resigned on Feb. 13 after he and another publicly unidentified person submitted a confidential whistle-blower complaint on a separate matter that has raised constitutional questions: a new ICE policy allowing deportation officers to enter homes and arrest people without a judicial warrant.

“ICE is teaching cadets to violate the Constitution,” he said on Monday at the event with congressional Democrats.

His account comes at a time when funding for the Homeland Security Department has lapsed as Democrats push for a range of new restrictions on immigration agents.

After a planned infusion of $75 billion over four years from Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy bill, ICE has embarked on a massive hiring spree. So far, the agency said it has hired over 12,000 new officers and agents, more than double the existing number. Between October and late January, more than 800 ICE recruits graduated from the academy, according to the documents, which were released by Democrats on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Another 3,204 recruits are projected to graduate by the end of September.

But the surge of recruits threatened to overwhelm the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, which trains most federal agents. In response, ICE officials scaled back the agency’s training regimen, a shift reflected in the newly disclosed documents.

The disclosures include syllabuses containing required courses and daily schedules for ICE basic training. A July 2025 syllabus shows recruits at that time received 584 hours of training over 72 days. A syllabus from this month, however, shows training reduced to eight hours per day over 42 days, which amounts to approximately 336 hours. That would be a roughly 40 percent decrease in training hours.

Todd Lyons, ICE’s acting director, told Congress this month that ICE recruits were now training for “six days a week, 12 hours a day.” He also said agents were receiving new training both before they reported to the training academy and once they showed up for their jobs.

“The meat of the training was never removed,” Mr. Lyons added after being pressed about whether ICE was lowering its standards.

In a fact sheet, the Homeland Security Department said that it had received an additional $750 million in funding for the training academy and that it had “streamlined training to cut redundancy and incorporate technology advancements, without sacrificing basic subject matter content.” The department also noted that many new ICE recruits are “experienced law enforcement officers who have already successfully completed a law enforcement academy.”

Administration officials had previously said the reduction in training time came largely from the elimination of Spanish-language classes. However, the documents show that a number of other classes listed as being required last year no longer appear in the February syllabus. They include courses on handling the property of detainees, filling out paperwork that alleges someone is in the United States without authorization, taking a “victim-centered approach” and “integrity awareness training.”

In addition, other documents show that ICE recruits must now complete only nine practical examinations to graduate from the training academy, compared with 25 exams that were listed in a training syllabus dated July 2021 that was also released by the Democrats.

Among the exams that are no longer listed as being required in an October 2025 syllabus are “Judgment Pistol Shooting” and “Determine Removability,” a reference to how agents decide if people they encounter have legal status in the United States. It was not clear from the documents when those exams were removed.

“Deficient training can and will get people killed,” Mr. Schwank said on Monday. “It can and will lead to unlawful arrests, violations of constitutional rights and fundamental loss of public trust in law enforcement.”

In a statement, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, encouraged other whistle-blowers to speak out.

“To anyone else who is repulsed by what you’re seeing or what authorities are asking you to do, please know that you can make a real difference by coming forward,” Mr. Blumenthal said.

Emily Powell and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Nicholas Nehamas is a Washington correspondent for The Times, focusing on the Trump administration and its efforts to transform the federal government.

Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times."

Training for New ICE Agents Is ‘Deficient’ and ‘Broken,’ Whistle-Blower Says - The New York Times