James Comey and Letitia James Cases Dismissed: Trump Live Updates
Nov. 24, 2025, 3:46 p.m. ET11 minutes ago
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As many as 100 seasonal workers at the National Park Service have not received some back pay after being furloughed during the government shutdown, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and four people briefed on the matter.
The Interior Department, which oversees the Park Service, owes these workers as much as $200,000 in total, according to the documents and the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.
The law that Congress passed to reopen the government included a provision that ensured back pay for federal workers who had been furloughed. The official guidance from the Office of Personnel Management states that such pay “must be provided at the earliest date possible after the lapse ends.”
Yet some seasonal workers are still waiting for as much as four weeks of back pay, according to the documents and two of the people briefed on the matter. The situation is predominantly affecting seasonal workers at national parks in the Northern and Central Rockies, which are among the most visited parks in the United States, those two people said.
Representatives for the Park Service, the Interior Department and the Office of Personnel Management did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Seasonal employees, including rangers and maintenance workers, usually join the Park Service in the spring and summer, when parks tend to be crowded. But many stay through the fall “shoulder season” to help parks close campgrounds, clear trails and make other preparations for winter.
Democratic members of Congress and park advocacy groups have urged the Trump administration to pay the employees the money owed.
“Working for national parks has always meant a secure, reliable paycheck,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group. “Our park rangers deserve better than this.”
Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, implored Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to compensate these workers in a letter sent on Thursday.
“Not only does withholding pay irreparably harm some of the N.P.S.’s most vulnerable staff at a time of immense difficulty and uncertainty, it discourages future applicants and further strains the N.PS.’s ability to recruit the skilled, committed employees the agency and the American public depend on,” Mr. Bennet wrote.
Senior officials at the Interior Department are expected to discuss whether to grant back pay to these workers during a meeting on Tuesday, according to two of the people briefed on the matter.
In early October, before Congress required retroactive pay for furloughed federal workers, President Trump suggested that the White House might try to deny them back pay.
Mr. Trump told reporters that it “depends on who you’re talking about,” adding that there were “some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”
Nov. 24, 2025, 3:41 p.m. ET16 minutes ago
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Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday asked the Manhattan federal court to release sealed materials related to the grand jury investigations of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell.
The Justice Department, in making the request to two federal judges, cited legislation signed by President Trump last week calling on the department to release its files on the government’s investigation into Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking ring.
Mr. Epstein was indicted in July 2019 in Manhattan on charges of sex trafficking minors and conspiracy; the following month, he was found hanged in a jail cell before he could be tried. His death was ruled a suicide. Ms. Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and other charges, is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
This summer, a Justice Department request to the same two judges to unseal the materials was rejected on grand jury secrecy grounds. In the new requests, the department said it interprets the new Epstein Files Transparency Act “as requiring it to publish the grand jury and discovery materials.”
“The Act manifests a Congressional intent to override some of the underlying bases for grand jury secrecy,” Ms. Bondi said in the motions submitted to Judge Richard M. Berman, who oversaw the Epstein case, and Paul A. Engelmayer, who has been assigned to Ms. Maxwell’s case.
The new motions were filed by Ms. Bondi and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, and were signed by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Ms. Bondi recently assigned Mr. Clayton’s office to conduct an investigation demanded by Mr. Trump into ties between Mr. Epstein and prominent Democrats.
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Banking is one of America’s most tightly regulated industries, and confidential bank examinations carried out by independent federal regulators are a core guardrail for protecting the safety and soundness of the financial system.
Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, is not a fan of how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where he is the acting director, has carried out those exams.
On Friday, the bureau said it would now require its financial examiners to recite a “humility pledge” to companies before beginning a review.
“The upcoming supervision examination cycle is going to be fundamentally different from the prior ones,” the pledge begins. It then details a set of changes, including a more limited review scope and an agency commitment to “work collaboratively” with the businesses it oversees.
In a notice announcing the change, the bureau described its own supervision department as “the weaponized arm” of the agency under its Biden-era director and said its exams had been carried out with “thuggery.”
On Monday, the consumer bureau’s staff union fired back with a statement denouncing the pledge as “creepy” and “disrespectful.”
“Is this fan fiction I’m reading?” Cat Farman, a bureau employee and the president of the staff union, wrote. She added, “Instead of traumatizing C.F.P.B. workers with his role-play fantasies, Vought should resign so we can finally do our jobs protecting Americans from Wall Street fraud again.”
The new pledge is, for now, mostly symbolic. Mr. Vought halted nearly all work at the bureau shorty after his arrival in February, and bank examinations have not resumed. The agency’s hundreds of examiners have been told to spend their time closing out all open matters; they are currently barred from initiating new ones.
And Mr. Vought has refused to request money for the consumer bureau from the Federal Reserve, which funds its operations. The bureau warned in court filings that it would run out of operating cash early next year.
The Trump administration is pursuing a variety of changes to give it greater sway over how independent financial regulators, including the Fed, oversee Wall Street. President Trump’s appointees have slashed supervision staffing and curtailed the scope of agencies’ bank exams.
Financial companies often complain that the exams they are subjected to are too exacting and time-consuming.
Because exams are confidential, they can identify — and, ideally, stop — small issues that could otherwise mushroom. The consumer bureau’s examiners have forced banks and other lenders to return hundreds of millions of dollars to consumers for improper fees and worthless services, and helped uncover high-profile issues like Wells Fargo’s sham accounts scandal.
Nov. 24, 2025, 2:23 p.m. ET2 hours ago
A footnote in the Comey opinion underscores a tricky issue his defense lawyers might raise if the Trump administration were to try to refile charges even though the statute of limitations has expired. Although federal law says the government gets another six months to bring new charges if an indictment is dismissed for “any reason,” there are also court precedents that say if an indictment is invalid, it is a “nullity” that cannot be used to delay the expiration of the statute of limitations — at least for the purpose of later filing a superseding indictment.
Nov. 24, 2025, 2:03 p.m. ET2 hours ago
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The Pentagon said on Monday that it was investigating Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona for “serious allegations of misconduct,” less than a week after he took part in a video that reminded troops to refuse illegal orders.
Senator Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, appeared in the video with five other Democratic lawmakers who served in the military or the intelligence community.
“Our laws are clear,” he said. “You can refuse illegal orders.” The other lawmakers repeated a similar message.
The brief video drew the ire of President Trump, who called last week for the lawmakers to be punished and suggested that they be executed. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site. He shared another person’s post that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an online post on Monday that the video was “despicable, reckless, and false,” and he argued that the lawmakers, who he disparaged as the “Seditious Six,” were encouraging troops to “ignore the orders of their Commanders.”
“Their foolish screed sows doubt and confusion — which only puts our warriors in danger,” he wrote.
In the wake of Mr. Trump’s accusations, all six of the lawmakers said that they have been subjected to death threats.
“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work,” Mr. Kelly said on Monday in a statement. “I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”
As part of their training, troops are told that they should not follow orders that are illegal or immoral, such as the intentional targeting of unarmed civilians.
“We swore an oath,” Mr. Kelly told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “All we said is we reiterated what basically is the rule of law. Members of the military should not, cannot follow illegal orders.”
Mr. Kelly, unlike the other lawmakers in the video, is a retired naval officer and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice could be recalled to active duty and disciplined. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan is a former C.I.A. analyst. The other four lawmakers are former military officers, but not retired and no longer subject to the court-martial proceedings.
“As was announced, the Department is reviewing his statements and actions, which were addressed directly to all troops while explicitly using his rank and service affiliation — lending the appearance of authority to his words,” Mr. Hegseth wrote in his online post. “Kelly’s conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.”
Mr. Hegseth listed Mr. Kelly’s rank at retirement as a Navy commander, one pay grade below captain, which is the rank listed on his official Senate bio.
The military scrutiny into Mr. Kelly’s statement on the video comes days after the Pentagon urged the House to investigate whether Representative Eugene Vindman, Democrat of Virginia, improperly worked on behalf of the Ukrainian government before he was elected to Congress.
Mr. Vindman, a retired Army officer, told The Washington Post that the allegations were an attempt to “intimidate and silence” him.
Mr. Vindman and his brother Alex Vindman, who is also a retired Army officer, played a central role in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, while serving on the National Security Council.
Mr. Trump was accused of trying to compel the Ukrainians to interfere in the 2020 election by publicly announcing a corruption investigation of Joseph R. Biden Jr., who at the time was Mr. Trump’s main rival for the presidency.
Nov. 24, 2025, 2:00 p.m. ET2 hours ago
The rulings dismissing the James Comey and Letitia James cases also cite a passage from the decision in July 2024 by Judge Aileen M. Cannon in Florida to dismiss the indictment against President Trump in the classified documents case. The cited line is about how if a prosecutor who obtained an indictment was not validly appointed, the only remedy is to dismiss the case.
Cannon’s ruling concerned the rules for appointing special counsels, rather than an interim U.S. attorney as in the Comey and James cases. Her conclusion that the special counsel, Jack Smith, was not validly appointed broke with decades of higher-court precedents dating back to the Watergate investigation. But Cannon’s decision did not face definitive judicial scrutiny because the Justice Department dropped its appeal after Trump won the 2024 election.
Nov. 24, 2025, 1:51 p.m. ET2 hours ago
While the government could apparently try to refile the case against James Comey if this ruling stands, there is a further complication: The federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia — not President Trump or Attorney General Pam Bondi — would decide whom to appoint to serve as the interim U.S. attorney until any Senate confirmation of a Trump nominee for that role. Given the history of the Comey case, which was only brought by the president’s handpicked prosecutor after her predecessor quit rather than prosecute Comey, it is not clear that anyone the court would pick would resubmit this indictment.
Nov. 24, 2025, 1:48 p.m. ET2 hours ago
The dismissal of the Comey and James indictments were “without prejudice,” which means the executive branch can try again to bring new charges. And even though the Comey indictment centered on testimony he delivered in September 2020, which means the five-year statute of limitations for charging him has now expired, the case can apparently be refiled. A federal statute about dismissed indictments, Section 3288 of Title 18 of the United States code, still gives the government another six months to bring a new case against him if today’s ruling stands.
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President Trump said he had accepted an invitation from China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to visit Beijing in April. The entreaty came during a call between the two leaders on Monday morning, in which they discussed several areas of bilateral and geopolitical tension, including lackluster Chinese purchases of American soybeans, along with Ukraine and Taiwan.
The call took place several weeks after a summit between the leaders in South Korea, where officials agreed to a yearlong truce that has rolled back many of the tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on China, and the retaliatory measures Beijing took in return.
In a social media post on Monday afternoon, Mr. Trump said it was a “very good telephone call” that touched on Ukraine, China’s exports of chemicals used to make fentanyl and its purchases of farm products. He described the call as a “follow up to our highly successful meeting in South Korea” and said there had been significant progress on both sides in meeting those commitments.
“Now we can set our sights on the big picture,” Mr. Trump said. “To that end, President Xi invited me to visit Beijing in April, which I accepted, and I reciprocated where he will be my guest for a State Visit in the U.S. later in the year.”
In its readout, Chinese state media said on Monday that the leaders had discussed the situation in Ukraine, and that Mr. Xi had called for both countries to maintain the positive momentum in their relationship since the South Korea meeting.
State media also reported that Mr. Xi had “clarified China’s principled position” on Taiwan, a self-governing island that China lays claim to. Mr. Xi emphasized “that Taiwan’s return to China is an important part of the postwar international order,” state media said. Mr. Trump had previously said that Taiwan did not come up in the meeting in South Korea.
Although the United States and China have greeted the prospect of an economic truce, U.S. officials have appeared wary in recent weeks about whether all the promises made at the summit would be fulfilled.
Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said this month that the United States and China were still working on details of an agreement that would guarantee the flow of valuable rare earth minerals from China. Beijing clamped down on exports of those products this year amid the trade clash, causing anxiety among automakers and other companies that need the minerals for their products.
U.S. and Chinese officials have also been at odds over China’s purchases of American farm goods. China halted purchases of American soybeans this year as trade tensions with the U.S. flared. After the meeting in South Korea, the Trump administration said China had agreed to resume purchases of American soybeans. The Chinese government, however, never specifically confirmed the details of that agreement.
Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, said on CNBC on Monday that China has now bought about 1.5 million metric tons of soybeans since Oct. 1, a total that is far short of the 12 million metric tons that the Trump administration said the Chinese government has pledged to purchase by the end of the year.
“We’ve got a significant way to go,” Ms. Rollins said. “Every sign is that their commitment remains true.”
Ms. Rollins said that the terms of the deal with China still needed to be finalized. She also explained that the preliminary agreement did not demand that the soybeans were shipped by the end of the year, but that orders needed to be placed.
Amid the truce, the Trump administration has also been debating what kind of American A.I. technology to sell to China. Tech executives favor selling more advanced products to the country to try to keep Chinese companies from developing competing goods, but some Washington officials still see any effort to aid China’s A.I. industry as a national security threat.
In an interview on Bloomberg TV on Monday, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary in charge of technology export licenses, said that Mr. Trump was listening to various advisers with different opinions on the topic, and that the decision about whether to sell the H200, a more advanced chip made by Nvidia, was “on his desk.”
“He is going to weigh those decisions,” Mr. Lutnick said of the president. “He understands President Xi the best. He will decide whether we go forward with that or not.”
Kevin Draper contributed reporting.
Nov. 24, 2025, 1:26 p.m. ET3 hours ago
The rulings by the judge dismissing the indictments of James Comey and Letitia James are littered with citations to conservative justices, including opinions by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, a book on statutory interpretation cowritten by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and a Justice Department memo written by the future Justice Samuel A. Alito.
A federal judge on Monday tossed out separate criminal charges against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, saying the loyalist prosecutor installed by President Trump to bring the cases was put into her job unlawfully.
The twin rulings, by Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, were the most significant setback yet to the president’s efforts to force the criminal justice system to punish his perceived foes.The case dismissals also served as a rebuke to Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had rushed to carry out Mr. Trump’s orders to appoint the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The dismissals, while embarrassing for the White House and the Justice Department, are unlikely to be the last word on an issue of constitutional authority that many legal experts expect could be appealed to the Supreme Court. And the way Judge Currie rendered her decision left open the possibility that another prosecutor could refile the charges against both Mr. Comey and Ms. James.
Judg Currie’s orders center on Mr. Trump’s unorthodox decision to appoint Ms. Halligan to her prosecutorial position in an interim capacity, replacing his previous pick, who was also serving in a temporary role. Within days after assuming her new post, Ms. Halligan rejected the advice of the career prosecutors in her new office and moved single-handedly to indict both Mr. Comey and Ms. James, two of the president’s most reviled targets.
In her rulings on Monday, Judge Currie said that it was unlawful to appoint two interim prosecutors in succession, and dismissed the charges against Mr. Comey and Ms. James without prejudice.
That meant that the government could try to refile the charges, whatever the outcome of the ultimate legal fight over the appointment of Ms. Halligan, a former White House aide and personal lawyer to Mr. Trump.
The administration is also likely to appeal the judge’s ruling, rather than acquiesce to the death of two high-profile cases just weeks after the president demanded they be brought.
A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, a lawyer for Mr. Comey, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said that with the dismissal of the case against his client, “an independent judiciary vindicated our system of laws not just for Mr. Comey but for all American citizens.”
Ms. James’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said the court ruling showed Mr. Trump “went to extreme measures to substitute one of his allies to bring these baseless charges after career prosecutors refused. This case was not about justice or the law; it was about targeting Attorney General James for what she stood for and who she challenged.”
Judge Currie’s ruling stems from a series of machinations that Mr. Trump undertook earlier this fall.
In late September, he rushed to oust Ms. Halligan’s predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, the career U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia who had expressed concern that there was not sufficient evidence to indict Mr. Comey and Ms. James. The president then replaced Mr. Siebert with Ms. Halligan who had no previous experience as a prosecutor.
When Ms. Halligan did the president’s bidding by hurrying to charge Mr. Comey and Ms. James, it was a generational erosion in the tradition of the White House keeping distance from the affairs of the Justice Department.
The indictment she secured against Mr. Comey charged him with lying to and obstructing Congress during testimony he gave in September 2020 about whether, as F.B.I. director, he had authorized leaks to the media about sensitive political investigations. Not long after, Ms. James was charged with bank fraud and making false statements in loan documents for a home she had purchased in Norfolk, Va.
Ms. James said in a written statement that she was “heartened by today’s victory and grateful for the prayers and support I have received from around the country.”
The timing of the Comey indictment, and the manner in which the judge dismissed it, could now lead to a legal fight over whether the government can try to refile the charges with another grand jury.
Mr. Comey was indicted just days before the five-year statute of limitations was set to run out on any charges stemming from his congressional testimony. His lawyers, and a magistrate judge, have said the statute has now expired, meaning charges could not be refiled.
Government prosecutors, however, have argued in court that the statute has not expired, because the clock was essentially paused when the indictment was returned. Mr. Comey’s legal team signaled Monday it was likely to fight any attempt to revive the case, insisting that the statute of limitations had run.
Judge Currie said that Mr. Trump and his attorney general, Ms. Bondi, had circumvented the law through the manner in which Ms. Halligan was elevated to oversee one of the country’s most important federal prosecutors’ offices.
The judge noted that both Ms. Halligan and Mr. Siebert had been serving in an interim capacity.
But the attorney general is permitted to appoint only one interim U.S. attorney to serve for a temporary 120-day period, Judge Currie noted. The law does not permit the appointment of successive interim prosecutors, the judge said, or else the White House could simply keep installing pliant people in powerful positions and get around the constitutional requirement for the Senate to confirm them.
Judge Currie wrote that if she did not dismiss the indictments, the consequences to the criminal justice system would be enormous.
“It would mean the government could send any private citizen off the street — attorney or not — into the grand jury room to secure an indictment so long as the attorney general gives her approval after the fact,” she wrote. “That cannot be the law.”
Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Chicago, said the judge’s rulings were not particularly surprising for most lawyers.
“The rationale the judge puts forward as to why this was an unconstitutional appointment is pretty sound; it’s just logic,” he said. Mr. Cotter said dismissing the charges “without prejudice,” meaning the charges could be refiled with another grand jury, gave prosecutors options to try to revive the cases.
“Under current federal law, when an indictment is dismissed, the government has six months to try to refile charges, and it may be even longer because of appeals,” he said.
Mr. Cotter said the rulings would probably put on hold other legal fights over whether the James and Comey cases were vindictive prosecutions of political foes.
Judge Currie, an appointee of President Bill Clinton who normally sits in South Carolina, was assigned to hear the question of Ms. Halligan’s appointment after the local federal judges were forced to step back to avoid any appearance of conflict in deciding on the fate of the U.S. attorney they routinely deal with.
Other federal judges have already ruled that Mr. Trump’s Justice Department unlawfully used similar procedural maneuvers to put loyalists in place at three other U.S. attorney’s offices. Those include Alina Habba, who was put in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey; Sigal Chattah, who was named the acting U.S. attorney for Nevada; and Bilal Essayli, whom Mr. Trump put in the top job at the U.S. attorney’s office in the Central District of California.
But Ms. Halligan’s involvement in the James and Comey cases was in many ways unique. In both matters, she appeared alone in front of the grand juries that returned indictments and was the sole prosecutor to have formally signed the charging documents. Because no other colleagues joined her in presenting to grand juries, Judge Currie ruled that the indictments she secured were invalid.
Although the charges against Mr. Comey and Ms. James were brought separately, their lawyers joined forces in challenging Ms. Halligan’s appointment.
Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.
Nov. 24, 2025, 11:12 a.m. ET5 hours ago
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick intensified efforts to get the European Union to ratchet back regulation of American tech companies during a visit to Brussels on Monday. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Lutnick said the E.U. needed to relax its digital rules in exchange for a deal to lower tariffs on steel and aluminum. The tariffs on metals, now 50 percent, have been bruising to European businesses, but the E.U. has not shown a willingness to change its laws, saying the policies are not up for negotiation.
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President Trump and China’s president, Xi Jinping, spoke in a phone call on Monday, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency. Xi said that since his meeting with Trump in South Korea in late October, relations between China and the United States had “remained generally stable and positive” and that the two leaders should seek to maintain that momentum, the agency reported. But Xi also emphasized the importance he attaches to Taiwan, which Beijing regards as its territory.
The Trump administration is ending Temporary Protected Status for citizens of Myanmar residing in the United States, the Department of Homeland Security said in a notice on Monday. The program allows foreign nationals to live temporarily in the United States when conditions in their home countries make return unsafe. Civil war has engulfed Myanmar, and the country is also under a U.S. travel ban imposed in June.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said Kyiv’s negotiators were returning home from Geneva and that he was expecting a “full report” this evening about the progress of weekend talks with U.S. officials about the peace plan. “Based on these reports, we will determine the next steps and the timing,” he said in a statement on X. Zelensky said earlier on Monday that Ukraine “managed to keep extremely sensitive points on the table” in the negotiations, but that “to achieve real peace, more, more is needed.”
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President Trump said in a social media post Monday that something “good” might be happening in the peace talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, without providing details. “Is it really possible that big progress is being made in Peace Talks between Russia and Ukraine??? Don’t believe it until you see it, but something good just may be happening,” Trump said on Truth Social. Ukrainian and American officials said they had made progress in talks held in Geneva over the weekend, but gave no details.
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U.S. and Ukrainian mediators emerged from two days of talks on Monday with a slimmed-down peace framework that shifts contentious issues onto a separate negotiating track, as Ukrainian officials underscored their country’s “red lines” on territory, military capacity and foreign alliances.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine was at a “critical moment” and would soon determine its next steps. He spoke after high-level discussions in Geneva on Sunday in which Ukraine and its European allies laid out concerns about a draft of a 28-point peace proposal that was favorable to Russia on many issues.
President Trump, who is pushing Ukraine to agree to a settlement by Thanksgiving but has indicated that talks could continue, said on Monday that “something good just may be happening.”
As Ukrainian officials told news outlets that a significant reworking of the plan had brought it closer to Ukraine’s position on several points, it raised questions about whether Russia would agree to any proposal that did not hew to its maximalist demands. The initial 28-point plan, drafted by the Trump administration with Russian input, called for Ukraine to cede land, shrink its army and forswear membership in NATO.
With the uncertainty about how the most sensitive issues will be resolved by the American and Ukrainian presidents, it remained to be seen whether the latest flurry of diplomacy would produce concrete results or fizzle as previous bursts did.
Until last week, the Trump administration’s efforts to broker an end to the war had been seemingly stalled. An August meeting in Alaska between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia produced little in the way of substance. Mr. Trump canceled a planned meeting last month with Mr. Putin in Budapest after he said the Russian president had no intention of making a deal.
The first public flickers of renewed movement came when Mr. Zelensky went to Turkey last week in hopes of reinvigorating efforts to end the war with what he said were new Ukrainian proposals. At the same time, Washington was sending a delegation of senior U.S. military officials to Kyiv for talks.
Reports emerged on Wednesday that the U.S. Army secretary Dan Driscoll had come bearing a 28-point proposal to end the war that reflected many Kremlin demands that Ukraine had consistently rejected.
That set off alarm bells well before Mr. Driscoll presented the plan to Mr. Zelensky on Thursday. The Ukrainian president said in a statement that night that Ukraine would engage “constructively, honestly and operationally” with the points in the plan.
The White House said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, an envoy for peace missions, had been “quietly” working on the proposal for a month but described the details as in “flux.”
The next day, as many Ukrainians and their European allies condemned the plan as akin to capitulation to Russia, Mr. Zelensky said in an address to the nation that Ukraine might have to choose between losing its dignity and forgoing U.S. support.
Not long after, plans for urgent talks between Ukrainian and U.S. officials began to take shape.
Mr. Zelensky sent his powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, to lead Kyiv’s delegation in Geneva. Washington sent Mr. Rubio and Mr. Witkoff, as well as Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law. Mr. Kushner, who is not a U.S. government employee, had also been involved in the Trump administration’s efforts to end the war between Israel and Hamas.
Mr. Rubio struck an optimistic tone on Sunday after the talks, saying that the gaps that remained were not insurmountable. He said that some issues — like the role of the European Union or of NATO in any settlement — had been set aside in the talks. Things like that, he said, needed to be discussed with the parties involved.
The White House and Ukraine’s presidency released a joint statement later that night saying the talks had resulted in an “updated and refined” draft, with “intensive work” to continue in the coming days.
On Monday, Mr. Zelensky said that Ukraine’s delegation was returning home and would deliver a full report about the progress of the talks. “Based on these reports, we will determine the next steps and the timing,” he said in a statement on X.
U.S. officials declined to say what parts of the proposal were adjusted in Geneva. Mr. Zelensky said that Kyiv had “managed to keep extremely sensitive points on the table,” including the release of all Ukrainian prisoners of war and the return of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia.
“But to achieve real peace, more, more is needed,” he told a parliamentary summit earlier on Monday, calling this a “critical moment” for Ukraine.
“Of course, we’ll continue working with partners, especially the United States, and look for compromises that strengthen, but not weaken us,” he said.
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At least one European leader suggested that there were still wide gaps in the discussions. “The negotiations were a step forward, but there are still major issues which remain to be resolved,” President Alexander Stubb of Finland wrote on social media.
Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, suggested on German public radio that the plan had been revised to address objections to a provision ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine.
“All questions concerning Europe, as well as those concerning NATO, have been removed from this plan,” Mr. Wadephul said.
“Now we must ensure,” he added, “that Ukraine’s sovereignty will be preserved.”
Ruslan Stefanchuk, the speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, emphasized Ukraine’s red lines in a speech during an event on Crimea in Sweden on Monday, which Mr. Zelensky also addressed virtually.
“No legal recognition of Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territories. No restrictions on the Ukrainian Defense Forces. No veto on Ukraine’s right to choose its future allies,” Mr. Stefanchuk said.
As Ukraine and Europe pressed for better terms in the proposal, it remained unclear when the talks would turn to Moscow.
The Kremlin said on Monday that it had not yet “officially” received any information about the outcome of the Geneva discussions. Russia is open to contacts and negotiations but has “no concrete details concerning talks involving us,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters. He said Russia did not plan to hold talks with American officials this week.
European leaders held their own meeting about the peace proposal negotiations while in Angola for a summit with the African Union.
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, told reporters afterward that while “works remains to be done” on the peace plan, the Geneva talks had helped ensure that “there is now a solid basis for moving forward.”
The key principles that Europe wants to see reflected in any peace plan include respect for Ukraine’s territory and sovereignty, she said. Kyiv’s allies are expected to meet again on Tuesday by videoconference.
“Only Ukraine, as a sovereign country, can make decisions regarding their armed forces,” Ms. von der Leyen said. “The choice of their destiny is in their own hands.”
Christopher F. Schuetze, Ivan Nechepurenko and Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting.
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President Trump intends to strip hundreds of Somalis living in the United States of the protected status they have had for decades under a program for immigrants from countries in crisis.
Mr. Trump specifically targeted “Somalis in Minnesota” in a social media post on Friday, writing that he was terminating their eligibility for the Temporary Protected Status program. More Somalis live in Minnesota than in any other state.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said in Minneapolis on Sunday that her office would evaluate whether to end protection for Somalis under the program. Doing so would require giving 60 days’ notice. Ms. Noem suggested that, if the status was revoked, the change would apply to Somali immigrants across the country, and not just in Minnesota.
Temporary Protected Status allows people from countries in turmoil because of a civil war, natural disaster or other crisis to live and work in the United States. Technically, the status is temporary, and meant to last about 18 months unless it is renewed — but it has often been renewed, and for several groups including the Somalis, it had become all but permanent.
Protected status was first granted to Somalis in 1991, when the country was torn apart by civil war and its national government collapsed. The designation has been extended many times since, including under the prior Trump administration. The most recent renewal was to last until mid-March.
Though there are an estimated 42,500 foreign-born Somalis living in Minnesota, only a small number of them are covered by the Temporary Protected Status program.
As of March, there were 705 Somalis in the whole United States who were covered by the status, according to the Congressional Research Service. Counting people from other covered countries as well, Minnesota has about 8,460 people with the protected status.
On his social media platform, Truth Social, Mr. Trump wrote on Friday that “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people” of Minnesota, and said that the state was a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.” Several Somali immigrants in Minnesota have been convicted in fraud schemes in recent years, including embezzlement of government funds from food-aid programs for hungry children.
Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, said on social media that Mr. Trump had chosen to “broadly target an entire community." Mr. Walz suggested that the president’s move was an attempt to distract attention from other issues in the administration.
Somalia is home to about 18 million people and is part of the Horn of Africa on the continent’s eastern side. The country has been racked by problems including violence, drought and poverty for decades. Recently, American aid groups have had to limit their work in the country because Mr. Trump dismantled the Agency for International Development.
About 73 percent of Somali immigrants in the United States are naturalized U.S. citizens, according to the Census Bureau.
Mr. Trump has moved to end T.P.S. protection for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from other countries, including Venezuela, Honduras, Afghanistan and, earlier this month, South Sudan.
Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Homeland Security Department allowed Somalis who had arrived in the United States in recent years to apply for the protection. The agency estimated last year that as many as 4,300 people could become eligible under that policy.
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Ukraine’s government has been insufficiently thankful for American aid, President Trump said Sunday, appearing to repeat his criticism of President Volodymyr Zelensky just as representatives from both nations were meeting to discuss a peace plan with Russia.
The complaint could increase the pressure on the Ukrainian president to accede to the 28-point peace plan, which includes many of the maximalist demands Moscow has made throughout the war. On Friday, Mr. Zelensky said the plan amounted to one of the most difficult moments in the country’s history.
Mr. Trump’s comment, which he shared in a post on social media, was only the latest expression of disdain for the Ukrainian leadership that he has made since his return to office.
“UKRAINE ‘LEADERSHIP’ HAS EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS,” Trump said.
Hours later, Mr. Zelensky thanked Mr. Trump in a statement on social media.
“We are grateful for everything that America and President Trump are doing for security, and we keep working as constructively as possible,” he said.
Although he did not mention Mr. Zelensky directly, Mr. Trump has frequently raised similar complaints about the Ukrainian president, whom he described in February as a “dictator without elections” in echoing a demand by Russia that Ukraine hold a presidential election, which are suspended under martial law.
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Later in February, a meeting between the two men in the Oval Office that had been intended to smooth over the relationship descended into acrimony as Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused Mr. Zelensky of being disrespectful to the United States and argued that Ukraine was in trouble. The two leaders subsequently put the episode behind them, trading kinder words before Mr. Trump’s criticism on Sunday.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022, Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly expressed thanks to the United States and its allies for tens of billions of dollars in military aid and other support, but he has also pressed for more.
That approach has at times caused tension with Ukraine’s allies. For example, Britain’s former defense minister, Ben Wallace, said in 2023 that Kyiv should express more appreciation. “We’re not Amazon,” he said, prompting Mr. Zelensky to quickly express his country’s appreciation for the help it had received.
Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized Ukraine’s requests for help during the administration of his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a staunch supporter of the government in Kyiv, and made it a central point of his campaign, along with claims that he would swiftly end the fighting.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump renewed his criticism of Mr. Biden, repeating his claim that Russia never would have invaded had he still been in office.
In a bid to end the conflict, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, met in Geneva on Sunday with Ukrainian officials over the peace plan. U.S. and Russian officials are also holding separate talks.
Under the proposal, Ukraine would have to cede some territory that it holds, limit the size of its military and forego efforts to join NATO. Ukraine’s allies including Britain, France and Germany have expressed reservations about the plan and many Ukrainians say that to accept its conditions would be tantamount to surrender.
Mr. Zelensky’s chief national security adviser, Rustem Umerov, said the proposals were a solid basis for discussion.
“Our current proposals, while still not finalized, include many Ukrainian priorities,” Mr. Umerov said on social media a few minutes after Mr. Trump’s post. “We appreciate our American partners working closely with us to understand our concerns to reach this critical point and we expect to make more progress.”
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday that the United States “authored” a 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, after a Republican senator asserted that Mr. Rubio had distanced himself from the proposal and called it a Russian initiative.
Mr. Rubio made the assertion on social media after the senator, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, said Mr. Rubio had earlier on Saturday held a call with a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers attending a security conference in Canada. Mr. Rounds said that Mr. Rubio had suggested during the call that it was a Russian proposal, not a U.S. plan.
“He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” Mr. Rounds said Saturday at a news conference at the Halifax International Security Forum, speaking about Mr. Rubio. “It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.”
Mr. Rounds said Mr. Rubio had “made it clear that it was an opportunity to have received” the plan. “You now have one side being presented, and the opportunity for the other side to respond,” Mr. Rounds said. Some critics of the plan have said it would force Ukraine to make unreasonable concessions to Russia.
Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, on Saturday denied an allegation that the plan was essentially a Russian wish list, saying that this was “blatantly false.”
“As Secretary Rubio and the entire Administration has consistently maintained, this plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and Ukrainians,” Mr. Pigott wrote on social media.
The plan, which was initially negotiated between the United States and Russia without direct Ukrainian involvement and has not officially been made public but has been widely leaked, would involve Ukraine ceding land it currently holds, limiting the size of its military and foregoing any attempt to join NATO. In the past, Ukraine has rejected these steps as a capitulation, and Ukraine’s allies have pushed back against the proposal.
Ukrainian, European and American officials, including Mr. Rubio, were meeting in Switzerland on Sunday as part of President Trump’s push to get Kyiv to accept a peace plan to end the war with Russia.
“The peace proposal was authored by the U.S.,” Mr. Rubio said on Saturday on his personal social media account. “It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations,” he said, adding: “It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.”
In his social media post, Mr. Rubio did not confirm whether he had spoken to Mr. Rounds and other U.S. lawmakers at the Halifax forum. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Angus King, independent of Maine, was one of several senators who spoke by phone to Mr. Rubio on Saturday, and also said that the secretary had described the peace plan as a Russian proposal rather than one drafted by the United States. On Sunday he criticized the plan, saying in a statement that it appeared “to have been developed after extensive consultation with the Russians and little, if any, input from Ukraine or our European allies.”
The plan “rewards Russia’s illegal and unprovoked aggression by handing over substantial portions of Ukraine’s sovereign territory,” Mr. King added in his statement, calling the “security guarantees” to prevent Russian aggression in the future “vague and inadequate.”
Mr. Trump has given President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine until Thursday to agree to the plan, though he said Saturday it was not a final offer and suggested that the deadline could be extended if there was progress in talks.
U.S. officials said that talks between Washington and Kyiv over the plan would take place in Switzerland and that separate talks between the United States and Russia are already underway.
On Saturday, some of Kyiv’s main backers, including Germany, France and Britain, issued a statement affirming their commitment to Ukraine and pushing back against provisions in the plan that would strip the country of territory and limit the size of its armed forces.
Ukraine’s allies in Europe, as well as Canada and Japan, are willing to work on the peace plan “despite some reservations,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland, who is in Johannesburg for the Group of 20 summit, said on social media on Sunday.
“However, before we start our work, it would be good to know for sure who is the author of the plan and where was it created,” he said.
Many Ukrainians have also said that to accept the peace proposal would amount to surrender.
Megan Mineiro contributed reporting from Washington."
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