POLITICS

Roozbeh Farahanipour sat in the blue-green glow of his Westwood restaurant’s 220-gallon saltwater aquarium and worried about Iran, his voice accented in anguish.

It was Sunday morning, and the homeland he fled a quarter-century ago had been bombed by the U.S. military, escalating a conflict that began nine days earlier when Israel sprang a surprise attack on its perennial Middle Eastern foe.

“Anger and hate for the Iranian regime — I have it, but I try to manage it,” said Farahanipour, owner of Delphi Greek restaurant and two other nearby eateries. “I don’t think that anything good will come out of this. If, for any reason, the regime is going to be changed, either we’re facing another Iraq or Afghanistan, or we’re going to see the Balkans situation. Iran is going to be split in pieces.”

Farahanipour, 53, who’d been a political activist before fleeing Iran, rattled off a series of questions as a gray-colored shark made lazy loops in the tank behind him. What might happen to civilians in Iran if the U.S. attack triggers a more widespread war? What about the potential loss of Israeli lives? And Americans, too? After wrestling with those weighty questions, he posed a more workaday one: “What’s gonna be the gas price tomorrow?”

Such is life for Iranian Americans in Los Angeles, a diaspora that comprises the largest Iranian community outside of Iran. Farahanipour, like other Iranian Americans interviewed by The Times, described “very mixed and complicated” feelings over the crisis in Iran, which escalated early Sunday when the U.S. struck three nuclear sites there, joining an Israeli effort to disrupt the country’s quest for an atomic weapon.

About 141,000 Iranian Americans live in L.A. County, according to the Iranian Data Dashboard, which is hosted by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. The epicenter of the community is Westwood, where the neighborhood’s namesake boulevard is speckled with storefronts covered in Persian script.

On Sunday morning, reaction to news of the conflict was muted in an area nicknamed “Tehrangeles” — a reference to Iran’s capital — after it welcomed Iranians who emigrated to L.A. during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In some stores and restaurants, journalists from CNN, Spectrum News and other outlets outnumbered Iranian patrons. At Attari Sandwich Shop, known for its beef tongue sandwich, the pre-revolution Iranian flag hung near the cash register — but none of the diners wanted to give an interview.

“No thank you; [I’m] not really political,” one middle-aged guest said with a wry smile.

Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology at UCLA, said that any U.S. involvement in a military conflict with Iran is freighted with meaning, and has long been the subject of hand-wringing.

“This scenario — which seems almost fantastical in a way — is something that has been in the imagination: the United States is going to bomb Iran,” said Harris, an Iranian American who wrote the book “A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran.” “For 20 years, this is something that has been regularly discussed.”

Many emigres find themselves torn between deep dislike and resentment of the authoritarian government they fled, and concern about the family members left behind. Some in Westwood were willing to chat.

A woman who asked to be identified only as Mary, out of safety concerns for her family in Iran, said she had emigrated five years ago and was visiting L.A. with her husband. The Chicago resident said that the last week and a half have been very difficult, partly because many in her immediate family, including her parents, still live in Tehran. They recently left the city for another location in Iran due to the ongoing attacks by Israeli forces.

“I am talking to them every day,” said Mary, 35.

Standing outside Shater Abbass Bakery & Market — whose owner also has hung the pre-1979 Iranian flag — Mary said she was “hopeful and worried.”

“It’s a very confusing feeling,” she said. “Some people, they are happy because they don’t like the government — they hate the government.” Others, she said, are upset over the destruction of property and death of civilians.

Mary had been planning to visit her family in Iran in August, but that’s been scrambled. “Now, I don’t know what I should do,” she said.

Not far from Westwood, Beverly Hills’ prominent Iranian Jewish community was making its presence felt. On Sunday morning, Shahram Javidnia, 62, walked near a group of pro-Israel supporters who were staging a procession headed toward the city’s large “Beverly Hills” sign. One of them waved an Israeli flag.

Javidnia, an Iranian Jew who lives in Beverly Hills and opposes the government in Iran, said he monitors social media, TV and radio for news of the situation there.

“Now that they’re in a weak point,” he said of Iran’s authoritarian leadership, “that’s the time maybe for the Iranians to rise up and try to do what is right.”

Javidnia came to the U.S. in 1978 as a teenager, a year before revolution would lead to the overthrow of the shah and establishment of the Islamic Republic. He settled in the L.A. area, and hasn’t been back since. He said returning is not something he even thinks about.

“The place that I spent my childhood is not there anymore,” he said. “It doesn’t exist.”

President Trump’s decision to strike three nuclear sites in Iran will almost assuredly draw more criticism from some of his supporters, including high-profile backers who had said any such move would run counter to the anti-interventionism he promised to deliver.

The lead-up to the strike announced Saturday exposed fissures within Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base as some of that movement’s most vocal leaders, with large followings of their own, expressed deep concern about the prospect of U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran war.

With the president barred from seeking a third term, what remains unknown is how long-lasting the schism could be for Trump and his current priorities, as well as the overall future of his “America First” movement.

Among the surrogates who spoke out against American involvement were former senior advisor Steve Bannon, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), commentator Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point. Part of their consternation was rooted in Trump’s own vocalized antipathy for what he and others have termed the “forever wars” fomented in previous administrations.

As the possibility of military action neared, some of those voices tamped down their rhetoric. According to Trump, Carlson even called to “apologize.”

Here’s a look at what some of Trump’s biggest advocates had said about U.S. military involvement in Iran:

Steve Bannon

On Wednesday, Bannon, one of the top advisors in Trump’s 2016 campaign, told an audience in Washington that bitter feelings over Iraq were a driving force for Trump’s first presidential candidacy and the MAGA movement. “One of the core tenets is no forever wars,” Bannon said.

But the longtime Trump ally, who served a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena in the congressional investigation into the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, went on to suggest that Trump will maintain loyalty from his base no matter what. On Wednesday, Bannon acknowledged that while he and others will argue against military intervention until the end, “the MAGA movement will back Trump.”

Ultimately, Bannon said that Trump would have to make the case to the American people if he wanted to get involved in Iran.

“We don’t like it. Maybe we hate it,” Bannon said, predicting what the MAGA response would be. “But, you know, we’ll get on board.”

Tucker Carlson

The commentator’s rhetoric toward Trump was increasingly critical. Carlson, who headlined large rallies with the Republican during the 2024 campaign, earlier this month suggested that the president’s posture was breaking his pledge to keep the U.S. out of new foreign entanglements. Trump clapped back at Carlson on social media, calling him “kooky.”

During an event at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said that Carlson had “called and apologized” for calling him out. Trump said Carlson “is a nice guy.”

Carlson’s conversation with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that day laid bare the divides among many Republicans. The two sparred for two hours over a variety of issues, primarily about possible U.S. involvement in Iran. Carlson accused Cruz of placing too much emphasis on protecting Israel in his foreign policy worldview.

“You don’t know anything about Iran,” Carlson said to Cruz, after the senator said he didn’t know Iran’s population or its ethnic composition. “You’re a senator who’s calling for the overthrow of a government, and you don’t know anything about the country.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

The Georgia Republican, who wore the signature red MAGA cap for Democratic President Biden’s State of the Union address in 2024, publicly sided with Carlson, criticizing Trump for deriding “one of my favorite people.”

Saying the former Fox News commentator “unapologetically believes the same things I do,” Greene wrote on X this past week that those beliefs include that “foreign wars/intervention/regime change put America last, kill innocent people, are making us broke, and will ultimately lead to our destruction.”

“That’s not kooky,” Greene added, using the same word Trump used to describe Carlson. “That’s what millions of Americans voted for. It’s what we believe is America First.”

Alex Jones

The far-right conspiracy theorist and Infowars host posted on social media earlier in the week a side-by-side of Trump’s official presidential headshot and an artificial intelligence-generated composite of Trump and former Republican President George W. Bush. Trump and many of his allies have long disparaged Bush for involving the United States in the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Writing “What you voted for” above Trump’s image and “What you got” above the composite, Jones added: “I hope this is not the case…”

Charlie Kirk

Kirk said in a Fox News interview at the start of the week that “this is the moment that President Trump was elected for.” But he had warned of a potential MAGA divide over Iran.

Days later, Kirk said that “Trump voters, especially young people, supported President Trump because he was the first president in my lifetime to not start a new war.” He also wrote that “there is historically little support for America to be actively engaged in yet another offensive war in the Middle East. We must work for and pray for peace.”

In Kirk’s view, “The last thing America needs right now is a new war. Our number one desire must be peace, as quickly as possible.”

Kinnard writes for the Associated Press.

President Trump and his administration have tried several tactics to block Harvard University’s enrollment of international students, part of the White House’s effort to secure policy changes at the private Ivy League college.

Targeting foreign students has become the administration’s cornerstone effort to crack down on the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college. The block on international enrollment, which accounts for a quarter of Harvard’s students and much of its global allure, strikes at the core of Harvard’s identity. Courts have stopped some of the government’s actions, at least for now — but not all.

In the latest court order, a federal judge Friday put one of those efforts on hold until a lawsuit is resolved. But the fate of Harvard’s international students — and its broader standoff with the Trump administration — remains in limbo.

Here are the ways the Trump administration has moved to block Harvard’s foreign enrollment — and where each effort stands.

Harvard’s certification to host foreign students

In May, the Trump administration tried to ban foreign students at Harvard, citing the Department of Homeland Security’s authority to oversee which colleges are part of the Student Exchange and Visitor Program. The program allows colleges to issue documents that foreign students need to study in the United States.

Harvard filed a lawsuit, arguing the administration violated the government’s own regulations for withdrawing a school’s certification.

Within hours, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston put the administration’s ban on hold temporarily — an order that had an expiration date. On Friday, she issued a preliminary injunction, blocking Homeland Security’s move until the case is decided. That could take months or longer.

The government can and does remove colleges from the Student Exchange and Visitor Program, making them ineligible to host foreign students on their campuses. However, it’s usually for administrative reasons outlined in law, such as failing to maintain accreditation, lacking proper facilities for classes, failing to employ qualified professional personnel — even failing to “operate as a bona fide institution of learning.” Other colleges are removed when they close.

Notably, Burroughs’ order Friday said the federal government still has authority to review Harvard’s ability to host international students through normal processes outlined in law. After Burroughs’ emergency block in May, DHS issued a more typical “Notice of Intent to Withdraw” Harvard’s participation in the international student visa program.

“Today’s order does not affect the DHS’s ongoing administrative review,” Harvard said Friday in a message to its international students. “Harvard is fully committed to compliance with the applicable F-1 (student visa) regulations and strongly opposes any effort to withdraw the University’s certification.”

U.S. entry for incoming Harvard students

Earlier this month, Trump moved to block entry to the United States for incoming Harvard students, issuing a proclamation that invoked a different legal authority.

Harvard filed a court challenge attacking Trump’s legal justification for the action — a federal law allowing the president to block a “class of aliens” deemed detrimental to the nation’s interests. Targeting only those who are coming to the U.S. to study at Harvard doesn’t qualify as a “class of aliens,” Harvard said in its filing.

Harvard’s lawyers asked the court to block the action. Burroughs agreed to pause the entry ban temporarily, without giving an expiration date. She has not yet ruled on Harvard’s request for another preliminary injunction, which would pause the ban until the court case is decided. “We expect the judge to issue a more enduring decision in the coming days,” Harvard told international students Friday.

At the center of Trump’s pressure campaign against Harvard are his assertions that the school has tolerated anti-Jewish harassment, especially during pro-Palestinian protests. In seeking to keep Harvard students from coming to the U.S., he said Harvard is not a suitable destination. Harvard President Alan Garber has said the university has made changes to combat antisemitism and will not submit to the administration’s demands for further changes.

Scrutiny of visas

In late May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed U.S. embassies and consulates to start reviewing social media accounts of visa applicants who plan to attend, work at or visit Harvard University for any signs of antisemitism.

On Wednesday, the State Department said it was launching new vetting of social media accounts for foreigners applying for student visas, and not just those seeking to attend Harvard. Consular officers will be on the lookout for posts and messages that could be deemed hostile to the United States, its government, culture, institutions or founding principles, the department said, telling visa applicants to set their social media accounts to “public.”

In reopening the visa process, the State Department also told consulates to prioritize students hoping to enroll at colleges where foreigners make up less than 15% of the student body, a U.S. official familiar with the matter said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to detail information that has not been made public.

Foreign students make up more than 15% of the total student body at almost 200 U.S. universities — including Harvard and the other Ivy League schools, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal education data from 2023. Most are private universities, including all eight Ivy League schools.

Some Harvard students are also caught up in the government’s recent ban against travel to the U.S. by citizens of 12 nations, mostly in Africa and the Middle East. The Trump administration last weekend called for 36 additional countries to commit to improving vetting of travelers or face a ban on their citizens visiting the United States.

F-1 and J-1 visas

Harvard sponsors more than 7,000 people on a combination of F-1 and J-1 visas, which are issued to students and to foreigners visiting the U.S. on exchange programs such as fellowships. Across all the schools that make up the university, about 26% of the student body is from outside the United States.

But some schools and programs, by nature of their subject matter, have significantly more international students. At the Harvard Kennedy School, which covers public policy and public administration, 49% of students are on F-1 visas. In the business school, one-third of students come from abroad. And within the law school, 94% of the students in the master’s program in comparative law are international students.

The administration has imposed a range of sanctions on Harvard since it rejected the government’s demands for policy reforms related to campus protests, admissions, hiring and more. Conservatives say the demands are merited, decrying Harvard as a hotbed of liberalism and antisemitism. Harvard says the administration is illegally retaliating against the university.

WASHINGTON — Fallout from President Trump’s historic gamble to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities reverberated across the Middle East Sunday, as Washington braced for an unpredictable response from a cornered but determined Islamic Republic.

While the Iranian government downplayed the impact of the U.S. attack, noting the depths of its nuclear know-how built over decades of study, U.S. military officials said its precision strikes against Iran’s three main nuclear facilities caused “extremely severe damage and destruction.”

A senior Israeli official told The Times that Jerusalem was so satisfied with the operation that it was prepared to suspend hostilities if Iran ends its missile salvos against Israeli territory.

“We are ready to be done,” the Israeli official said, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

As the dust settled, the sun rose and satellite imagery emerged of the wreckage, the main question among Trump administration officials became how Tehran would respond — both militarily, against U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf and around the world, as well as with the remnants of its nuclear program, with so much of it destroyed.

Tehran’s nuclear-armed allies, in Russia and North Korea, have been critical of the military campaign, with former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev raising the prospect of Moscow giving Iran a nuclear warhead in response to the attacks.

The Israeli official dismissed that idea, alluding to direct talks with Moscow over the Iranian program. “We are not concerned,” the official said.

President Trump addresses the nation Saturday night about the U.S. military strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites. He is accomapnied by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

(Carlos Barria / Pool via Associated Press)

Trump’s military action, dubbed “Operation Midnight Hammer,” was a contingency years in the making, prepared and much feared by Trump’s predecessors over two decades as a desperate last resort to a nuclear Iran.

Ever since Tehran resumed its fissile enrichment program in 2005, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have warned that the Islamic Republic could never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. But a constellation of diplomatic talks and complex agreements have failed to dissuade Tehran from a fundamental principle of a “right to enrich” uranium — near to weapons grade — on its own soil.

Despite the dramatic nature of the U.S. air raid, few in Washington expressed an appetite for a prolonged U.S. war with Iran and echoed Israel’s interest in a truce after assessing its initial operations a success. Vice President JD Vance denied that the United States was “at war” with Iran on Sunday, telling CBS that the nation is, instead, “at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”

But the prospect of another full-scale U.S. war in the Middle East, made palpable by the weekend strikes, shook Capitol Hill on Sunday, compelling Democrats who have long advocated a tough approach to Iran to push for a vote to restrict Trump under the War Powers Act.

More than 60 members of Congress, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York, called on the Trump administration to seek congressional authorization for any further action. At least one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, joined in the call.

The Pentagon said that seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers deployed a total of 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrators — 30,000-pound bombs known as “bunker busters,” for their ability to destroy facilities buried deep underground — against Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

The U.S. operation followed an Israeli campaign that began last week with strikes against Iranian air defenses and nuclear facilities, scientists and research facilities, as well as against military generals, ballistic missile launch pads and storage depots.

While the United States and Israel believe that Saturday’s strikes were a strategic victory, some concern remains that Iran may have removed critical equipment and materiel from its site in Fordow — an enrichment facility that had been burrowed into the side of a mountain — to an undisclosed location before the U.S. operation began, the Israeli official said.

“That remains a question mark,” the official added, while expressing confidence that Israeli intelligence would be aware of any other significant nuclear facilities.

Addressing the nation on the attacks on Saturday night, Trump warned Iran that U.S. attacks could continue if it refuses to give up on its nuclear program.

“There will be either peace, or there will be tragedy for Iran, far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days,” Trump said, flanked by his vice president, national security advisor and secretary of defense. “Remember, there are many targets left. Tonight’s was the most difficult of them all, by far, and perhaps the most lethal. But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill. Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes.”

Satellite image shows the Natanz enrichment facility in Iran after U.S. strikes.

(Maxar Technologies via Associated Press)

Across the region Sunday, the question paramount on observers’ minds was what shape Iran’s response would take.

Iranian officials downplayed the strikes’ impact, acknowledging damage to nuclear facilities but that the know-how remained intact.

“They [the United States and Israel] should know this industry has roots in our country, and the roots of this national industry cannot be destroyed,” said Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, according to a Sunday interview with the semi-official Tasnim News Agency.

“Of course, we have suffered some losses, but this is not the first time that the industry has suffered damage. … Naturally, this industry must continue and its growth will not stop.”

Hassan Abedini, the deputy political director of Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB, said the three targeted nuclear sites had already been emptied some time before the attacks and that they “didn’t suffer a major blow because the materials had already been taken out.”

Other officials, including leaders in the targeted areas in Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow, reassured residents there was no nuclear contamination as a result of the strikes and that they could “go on with their lives,” according to a statement Sunday from government spokesperson Fatemah Mohajerani.

The U.S. attacks drew swift pleas for restraint from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both of which issued statements calling on all parties to de-escalate. Iraq, meanwhile, said the U.S. escalation “constitutes a grave threat to peace and security in the Middle East,” according to an interview with its government spokesman on Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera.

Oman, a key mediator in the negotiations between Tehran and Washington, was more scathing, expressing what it said was its “denunciation and condemnation” of the U.S.’s attacks.

In Europe, as well, governments urged caution and affirmed support for Israel.

“We have consistently been clear that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and can no longer pose a threat to regional security,” France, Germany, and Italy, known as the E3, said in a statement. “Our aim continues to be to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

The last significant face-off between Iran and the United States happened during Trump’s first term, when he ordered the assassination of top Iranian commander Gen. Qassem Suleimani in 2020.

Satellite image shows a close view of the Isfahan nuclear technology facility in Iran after U.S. strikes.

(Maxar Technologies via Associated Press)

That attack spurred predictions of a furious retaliation, with fears of Tehran deploying its missile arsenal or activating its network of regional militias to attack U.S. forces and interests across Washington’s footprint in the region. Instead, Tehran reacted with little more than an openly telegraphed ballistic missile barrage on a U.S. base in Iraq.

Iran’s options are even more limited this time. Much of that network — known as the “Axis of Resistance” and which included militias and pro-Tehran governments in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Afghanistan and Yemen — lies incapacitated after more than 20 months of Israeli attacks.

Allies such as Russia and China, though issuing condemnations of the U.S. attack, appear to have little appetite for involvement beyond statements and offers of mediation. And how much remains of Tehran’s missile capacity is unclear, with the Israeli official estimating roughly 1,000 ballistic missiles – half of their capacity before the most recent conflict started – remaining available to them.

Nevertheless, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that the United States should expect “regrettable responses.”

“Instead of learning from repeated failures, Washington effectively placed itself on the front lines of aggression by directly attacking peaceful installations,” said a statement from the Guard Corps on Sunday. It hinted that its targets would include U.S. military presence in the region.

“The number, dispersion, and size of U.S. military bases in the region are not a strength, but have doubled their vulnerability,” the statement said.

The United States has more than 40,000 stationed in the region, according to Pentagon figures, and has bases in at least 10 countries in the region, not to mention a significant presence at sea.

Yet experts say the likeliest scenario would involve disruptions to shipping lanes, with Iran leveraging its control of the Strait of Hormuz, an oil transit chokepoint handling a fifth of the world’s energy flows, that is 30 miles wide at its narrowest point; or calling on Yemen’s Houthis to intensify their harassment campaign of merchant vessels on the Red Sea.

It a situation in which Iran has experience: During its conflict with Iraq in the eighties, Tehran engaged in the the so-called “Tanker War,” attacked hundreds of Iraqi ships near Hormuz and entering into direct confrontations with the U.S. Navy.

Shippers are already girding themselves for disruptions. But Danish shipping giant Maersk said it was continuing to use the Strait of Hormuz for the time being.

“We will continuously monitor the security risk to our specific vessels in the region and are ready to take operational actions as needed,” Maersk said in a statement.

Wilner reported from Washington, Bulos from Beirut.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s bombardment of three sites in Iran quickly sparked debate in Congress over his authority to launch the strikes, with Republicans praising Trump for decisive action as many Democrats warned he should have sought congressional approval.

“Well done, President Trump,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) posted on X. Another Republican, Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, called the bombings “strong and surgical.” The Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), said Trump “has made a deliberate — and correct — decision to eliminate the existential threat posed by the Iranian regime.”

The divisions in Congress reflected an already swirling debate over the president’s ability to conduct such a consequential action without authorization from the House and Senate on the use of military force. Though Trump is hardly the first U.S. president to carry out acts of war without congressional approval, his expansive use of presidential power raised immediate questions about what comes next, and whether he is exceeding the limits of his authority.

“This was a massive gamble by President Trump, and nobody knows yet whether it will pay off,” said Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Democrats, and a few Republicans, said the strikes were unconstitutional, and demanded more information in a classified setting. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said that he received only a “perfunctory notification” without any details, according to a spokesperson.

“No president should be allowed to unilaterally march this nation into something as consequential as war with erratic threats and no strategy,” Schumer said in a statement. “Confronting Iran’s ruthless campaign of terror, nuclear ambitions, and regional aggression demands strength, resolve, and strategic clarity.”

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said that Trump “misled the country about his intentions, failed to seek congressional authorization for the use of military force and risks American entanglement in a potentially disastrous war in the Middle East.”

The quick GOP endorsements of stepped-up U.S. involvement in Iran came after Trump publicly considered the strikes for days and many congressional Republicans had cautiously said they thought he would make the right decision. The party’s schism over Iran could complicate the GOP’s efforts to boost Pentagon spending as part of a $350-billion national security package in Trump’s massive tax and spending bill, which he planned to push toward speedy votes this week.

“We now have very serious choices ahead to provide security for our citizens and our allies,” Wicker posted on X.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) both were briefed ahead of the strikes Saturday, according to people familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to discuss it. Thune said Saturday evening that “as we take action tonight to ensure a nuclear weapon remains out of reach for Iran, I stand with President Trump and pray for the American troops and personnel in harm’s way.”

Johnson said in a statement that the military operations “should serve as a clear reminder to our adversaries and allies that President Trump means what he says.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) said he had also been in touch with the White House and that “I am grateful to the U.S. servicemembers who carried out these precise and successful strikes.”

Breaking from many of his Democratic colleagues, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a staunch supporter of Israel’s military actions in the Middle East, also praised the U.S. attacks on Iran. “As I’ve long maintained, this was the correct move by @POTUS,” he posted. “Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and cannot have nuclear capabilities.”

Both parties have seen splits in recent days over the prospect of striking Iran, including among some of Trump’s most ardent supporters who share his criticism of America’s “forever wars.” Republican Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio posted that “while President Trump’s decision may prove just, it’s hard to conceive a rationale that’s Constitutional.”

Kentucky GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, a longtime opponent of U.S. involvement in foreign wars, posted on X: “This is not Constitutional.”

“This is not our fight,” said Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, one of Trump’s most loyal congressional allies.

Most Democrats have maintained that Congress should have a say, even as presidents in both parties have ignored the legislative branch’s constitutional authority. The Senate was scheduled to vote soon on a resolution from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) that would require congressional approval before the U.S. declares war on Iran or takes specific military action.

Kaine said the bombings were an act of “horrible judgment.”

“I will push for all senators to vote on whether they are for this third idiotic Middle East war,” Kaine said.

Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also called on Congress to immediately pass a war powers resolution. He said politicians had always promised that “new wars in the Middle East would be quick and easy.”

“Then they sent other people’s children to fight and die endlessly,” Casar said. “Enough.”

Jalonick and Mascaro write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — President Trump, with his decision to order U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, is gambling that direct U.S. involvement can deliver a decisive blow to a weakened Tehran while managing to avoid bringing the U.S. into an expansive regional conflict.

Trump announced the strikes on three Iranian enrichment facilities — Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan — and said that a “full payload of BOMBS was dropped” on Fordo.

“All planes are safely on their way home,” Trump added in his post. “Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”

It remained to be seen whether the attacks mark the totality of direct American involvement in strikes against Iran or the opening salvo of a larger campaign.

Trump, who said he would address the nation about the strikes at 10 p.m. Eastern time, called it a “very successful military operation.” The president also celebrated the strikes in a call with the news site Axios in which he said, “We had great success tonight” and that “Israel is much safer now.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday had said that Trump would decide whether to move forward with U.S. strikes on Iran within two weeks.

But on Saturday afternoon, commercial flight trackers identified multiple U.S. aerial refueling tankers on a path suggesting that they were accompanying aircraft from the Midwest to the Pacific, raising speculation that something could be afoot.

Still, the flight pattern left many in Washington speculating that an attack might happen soon but would not happen immediately because of the time it would take for the aircraft to make it to the region. But that aircraft may have been a decoy — it was not part of the mission that was carried out early Sunday morning in Iran.

Trump returned from his New Jersey golf club just after 6 p.m. and was to head to a previously scheduled meeting with his national security team. Less than two hours later, the president announced the strikes had been completed.

The decision to directly involve the U.S. comes after more than a week of strikes by Israel on Iran that have moved to systematically eradicate the country’s air defenses and offensive missile capabilities, while damaging its nuclear enrichment facilities.

The strikes are a perilous decision for the U.S., as Iran has pledged to retaliate if it joined the Israeli assault. The stakes are also high for Trump personally — he won the White House on the promise of keeping America out of costly foreign conflicts and scoffed at the value of American interventionism.

U.S. and Israeli officials have said that American stealth bombers and 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs offered the best chance of destroying heavily fortified sites connected to the Iranian nuclear program buried deep underground, including at Fordo.

It was not immediately clear whether the U.S. bombers did in fact drop the bunker busters on the Iranian facilities.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned the United States in advance that strikes targeting the Islamic Republic would “result in irreparable damage for them.” And Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei declared “any American intervention would be a recipe for an all-out war in the region.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the damage inflicted by the bombings.

Trump has vowed that he would not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon and said he had initially hoped that the threat of force would motivate the country’s leaders to give up their nuclear program peacefully.

But Trump appears to have made the calculation — at the prodding of Israeli officials and many Republican lawmakers — that Israel’s operation had softened the ground and presented a perhaps unparalleled opportunity to set back Iran’s nuclear program, perhaps permanently.

The Israelis have said their offensive has already crippled Iran’s air defenses, allowing them to already significantly degrade multiple Iranian nuclear sites.

But to destroy the Fordo nuclear fuel enrichment plant, Israel had appealed to Trump for the U.S. bunker-busting bombs, the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which uses its immense weight and sheer kinetic force to reach deeply buried targets and then explode. The penetrator is currently delivered only by the B-2 stealth bomber, which is found only in the American arsenal.

The bomb carries a conventional warhead and is believed to be able to penetrate about 200 feet below the surface before exploding, and the bombs can be dropped one after another, effectively drilling deeper and deeper with each successive blast.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that Iran is producing highly enriched uranium at Fordo, raising the possibility that nuclear material could be released into the area if the GBU-57 A/B were used to hit the facility.

Trump’s decision for direct U.S. military intervention comes after his administration made an unsuccessful two-month push — including with high-level, direct negotiations with the Iranians — aimed at persuading Tehran to curb its nuclear program.

For months, Trump said he was dedicated to a diplomatic push to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. And he twice — in April and again in late May — persuaded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on military action against Iran and give diplomacy more time.

The U.S. in recent days has been shifting military aircraft and warships into and around the Middle East to protect Israel and U.S. bases from Iranian attacks.

All the while, Trump has gone from publicly expressing hope that the moment could be a “second chance” for Iran to make a deal to delivering explicit threats on Khamenei and making calls for Tehran’s unconditional surrender.

“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” Trump said in a social media posting. “He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”

The military showdown with Iran comes seven years after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Obama administration-brokered agreement in 2018, calling it the “worst deal ever.”

The 2015 deal, signed by Iran, the U.S. and other world powers, created a long-term, comprehensive nuclear agreement that limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

Trump decried the Obama-era deal for giving Iran too much in return for too little, because the agreement did not cover Iran’s non-nuclear malign behavior.

Trump has bristled at criticism from some of his MAGA faithful, including conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who have suggested that further U.S. involvement would be a betrayal to supporters who were drawn to his promise to end U.S. involvement in expensive and endless wars.

The action by Trump immediately raised some concerns among U.S. lawmakers that the president had exceeded his authority.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) quickly posted on the social media site X: “This is not Constitutional.” California Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) said on social media that Trump hit Iran without congressional authorization and that lawmakers should pass a resolution he’s sponsoring with Massie “to prevent America from being dragged into another endless Middle East war.”

Vice President JD Vance in a lengthy posting on X earlier this week defended his boss, while acknowledging that “people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy.”

“But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue,” Vance wrote. He added, “I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people’s goals.”

Madhani and Boak write for the Associated Press. Madhani reported from Morristown, N.J.

After nearly two years of stark divisions over the war in Gaza and support for Israel, Democrats remain at odds over policy toward Iran after the U.S. strikes early Sunday.

Progressives demanded unified opposition before President Trump announced U.S. strikes against Tehran’s nuclear program, but party leaders were treading more cautiously.

U.S. leaders of all stripes have found common ground for two decades on the position that Iran could not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. The longtime U.S. foe has supported groups that have killed Americans across the Mideast and threatened to destroy Israel. But Trump’s announcement Saturday that the U.S. had struck three nuclear sites could become the Democratic Party’s latest schism, just as it was sharply dividing Trump’s isolationist “Make America Great Again” base from more hawkish conservatives.

Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, noted that in January, Trump suggested the U.S. could “measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

“Today, against his own words, the president sent bombers into Iran,” Martin said in a statement. “Americans overwhelmingly do not want to go to war. Americans do not want to risk the safety of our troops abroad.”

Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, said the U.S. entering the war in Iran “does not make America more secure.”

“This bombing was an act of war that risks retaliation by the Iranian regime,” Welch said in a statement.

While progressives in the lead-up to the military action had staked out clear opposition to Trump’s potential intervention, the party leadership played the safer ground of insisting on a role for Congress before any use of force.

Martin’s statement took a similar tack, saying, “Americans do not want a president who bypasses our constitution and pulls us towards war without Congressional approval. Donald Trump needs to bring his case to Congress immediately.”

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine called Trump’s actions “horrible judgment” and said he’d “push for all senators to vote on whether they are for this third idiotic Middle East war.”

Many prominent Democrats with 2028 presidential aspirations had been silent on the Israel-Iran war, even before Trump’s announcement — underscoring how politically tricky the issue can be for the party.

“They are sort of hedging their bets,” said Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of State who served under President Obama and is now a strategist on foreign policy. “The beasts of the Democratic Party’s constituencies right now are so hostile to Israel’s war in Gaza that it’s really difficult to come out looking like one would corroborate an unauthorized war that supports Israel without blowback.”

Progressives

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) had called Trump’s consideration of an attack “a defining moment for our party.” Khanna had introduced legislation with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) that called on the Republican president to “terminate” the use of U.S. armed forces against Iran unless “explicitly authorized” by a declaration of war from Congress.

Khanna used Trump’s campaign arguments of putting American interests first when the congressman spoke to Theo Von, a comedian who has been supportive of the president and is popular among Trump supporters, particularly young men.

“That’s going to cost this country a lot of money that should be being spent here at home,” said Khanna, who is said to be among the many Democrats considering seeking the presidential nomination in 2028.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination, had pointed to Trump’s stated goal during his inaugural speech of being known as “a peacemaker and a unifier.”

“Supporting Netanyahu’s war against Iran would be a catastrophic mistake,” Sanders said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sanders reintroduced legislation prohibiting the use of federal money for force against Iran, insisted that U.S. military intervention would be unwise and illegal and accused Israel of striking unprovoked. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York signed on to a similar bill from Sanders in 2020, but so far was holding off this time.

Some believed the party should stake out a clear antiwar stance.

“The leaders of the Democratic Party need to step up and loudly oppose war with Iran and demand a vote in Congress,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama aide, on X.

Mainstream Democrats

The staunch support from the Democratic administration of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for Israel’s war against Hamas loomed over the party’s White House ticket in 2024, even with the criticism of Israel’s handling of the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Trump exploited the divisions to make inroads with Arab American voters and Orthodox Jews on his way back to the White House.

Today, the Israel-Iran war is the latest test for a party struggling to repair its coalition before next year’s midterm elections and the quick-to-follow kickoff to the 2028 presidential race. The party will look to bridge the divide between an activist base that is skeptical of foreign interventions and already critical of U.S. support for Israel and more traditional Democrats and independents who make up a sizable, if not always vocal, voting bloc.

In a statement after Israel’s first strikes on Iran, Schumer said Israel has a right to defend itself and “the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security and defense must be ironclad as they prepare for Iran’s response.”

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) said that “the U.S. must continue to stand with Israel, as it has for decades, at this dangerous moment.”

Other Democrats have condemned Israel’s strikes and accused Netanyahu of sabotaging nuclear talks with Iran. They are reminding the public that Trump withdrew in 2018 from a multinational nuclear agreement that limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions negotiated during the Obama administration.

“Trump created the problem,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) posted on X.

What voters think

A Pearson Institute/Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from September 2024 found that about half of Democrats said the U.S. was being “too supportive” of Israel and about 4 in 10 said its level of support was “about right.” Democrats were more likely than independents and Republicans to say the Israeli government had “a lot” of responsibility for the continuation of the war between Israel and Hamas.

About 6 in 10 Democrats and half of Republicans said they felt Iran was an adversary with whom the U.S. was in conflict.

Gomez Licon and Beaumont write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Linley Sanders, Will Weissert and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report

Several close U.S. allies urged a return to the negotiating table in the wake of American strikes on Iran that fueled fears of a wider conflict, while noting the threat posed by Tehran’s nuclear program. Some countries and groups in the region, including those that support Iran, condemned the move while also urging de-escalation.

President Trump had said Thursday that he would decide within two weeks whether to get involved in Israel’s war with Tehran. In the end, it took just days. Washington hit three Iranian nuclear sites early Sunday in Iran.

While the amount of damage remained unclear, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the U.S. had “crossed a very big red line,” the time for diplomacy was over and Iran had the right to defend itself.

Some have questioned whether a weakened Iran would capitulate or remain defiant and begin striking with allies at U.S. targets scattered across the Persian Gulf region.

Here is a look at reactions from governments and officials around the world.

United Nations

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said he was “gravely alarmed” by the use of force by the United States.

“There is a growing risk that this conflict could rapidly get out of control — with catastrophic consequences for civilians, the region, and the world,” he said in a statement on the social media platform X. “I call on Member States to de-escalate.

“There is no military solution. The only path forward is diplomacy.”

United Kingdom

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned of escalation beyond the Middle East as he called for all sides to negotiate a diplomatic end to the crisis, saying stability was the priority in the volatile region.

The U.K., along with the European Union, France and Germany, tried unsuccessfully to broker a diplomatic solution in Geneva last week with Iran.

Starmer said Iran’s nuclear program posed a grave threat to global security.

“Iran can never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon and the U.S. has taken action to alleviate that threat,” Starmer said.

Russia

Dmitry Medvedev, who serves as deputy head of President Vladimir Putin’s Security Council, said several countries were prepared to supply Tehran with nuclear weapons.

He didn’t specify which countries, but said the U.S. attack caused minimal damage and would not stop Tehran from pursuing nuclear weapons.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it “strongly condemned” the airstrikes and called them a “a gross violation of international law, the U.N. Charter, and U.N. Security Council resolutions.”

Iraq

The Iraqi government condemned the U.S. strikes, saying the military escalation created a grave threat to peace and security in the Middle East. It said it poses serious risks to regional stability, and it called for diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the crisis.

“The continuation of such attacks risks dangerous escalation with consequences that extend beyond the borders of any single state, threatening the security of the entire region and the world,” government spokesman Bassem al-Awadi said in the statement.

Egypt

President Abdel Fattah Sisi warned of “grave repercussions” for expanding the Middle East conflict and urged a return to negotiations.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, which previously condemned Israel’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leaders, expressed “deep concern” about the U.S. airstrikes, but stopped short of condemning them.

“The Kingdom underscores the need to exert all possible efforts to exercise restraint, de-escalate tensions, and avoid further escalation,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Qatar

Qatar, which is home to the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, said it “regrets” escalating tensions in the Israel-Iran war.

Its Foreign Ministry in a statement urged all parties to show restraint and “avoid escalation, which the peoples of the region, burdened by conflicts and their tragic humanitarian repercussions, cannot tolerate.”

Qatar has served as a key mediator in the Israel-Hamas war.

Hamas and the Houthis

The Houthi rebels in Yemen and Hamas in the Gaza Strip condemned the U.S. strikes.

The Houthi political bureau in a statement called on Muslim nations to join “the Jihad and resistance option as one front against the Zionist-American arrogance.”

Hamas and the Houthis are part of the “Axis of Resistance,” a collection of pro-Iranian proxies backed by the Tehran government stretching from Yemen to Lebanon that for years gave the Islamic Republic considerable power across the region.

Lebanon

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said the U.S. bombing could lead to a regional conflict that no country could bear and called for negotiations.

“Lebanon, its leadership, parties, and people, are aware today, more than ever before, that it has paid a heavy price for the wars that erupted on its land and in the region,” Aoun said in a statement on X. “It is unwilling to pay more.”

Pakistan

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who spoke by phone with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, condemned the U.S. strikes as a “serious violation of international law,” his office said.

The condemnation comes less than 24 hours after Sharif’s government said on X it was recommending Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in defusing the recent India-Pakistan crisis.

China

China condemned the U.S. strikes on Iran, calling them a serious violation of international law that further inflamed tensions in the Middle East.

In a statement, the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged all parties — especially Israel — to implement a cease-fire and begin dialogue.

“China is willing to work with the international community to pool efforts together and uphold justice, and contribute to the work for restoring peace and stability in the Middle East,” the ministry said.

European Union

The European Union’s top diplomat said Iran must not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, but she urged those involved in the conflict to show restraint.

“I urge all sides to step back, return to the negotiating table and prevent further escalation,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in a post on social media.

Italy

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she discussed the worsening crisis with several other members of the Group of 7 leading industrial nations, as well as the Saudi, Emirati and Qatari leaders, and all agreed to work toward negotiations to prevent a widening conflict.

European Council

President Antonio Costa said he was “deeply alarmed” by the bombings and called on all parties to “show restraint and respect for international law and nuclear safety.”

“Too many civilians will once again be the victims of a further escalation,” Costa added. “The EU will continue engaging with the parties and our partners to find a peaceful solution at the negotiating table.”

Netherlands

Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp, whose country is hosting a summit of NATO leaders including Trump on Tuesday and Wednesday, said the government’s national security council would meet later to discuss the issue.

He said the U.S. attacks amounted to “a further escalation of a worrying situation in the Middle East.”

Latin America

Left-wing Latin American governments expressed fierce opposition to the U.S. strikes.

Iran-allied Venezuela called the attacks “illegal, unjustifiable and extremely dangerous.” Colombian President Gustavo Petro said they were an insult to the Middle East. Chilean President Gabriel Boric said they violated “rules we have established as humanity.” Mexico’s Foreign Ministry made “an urgent call for peace.”

In contrast, Argentina’s hard-right president, Javier Milei, a loyal ally of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, praised the attacks on social media. “Terrorism, never again,” his spokesperson said.

Japan

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba told reporters Sunday that it was crucial to calm the situation as soon as possible, adding that the Iranian nuclear weapons development also must be prevented.

Ishiba, asked whether he supports the U.S. attacks on Iran, declined to comment.

The Vatican

Pope Leo XIV made a strong appeal for peace during his Sunday Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square, calling for international diplomacy to “silence the weapons.”

After an open reference to the “alarming” situation in Iran, the first American pontiff stressed that “today more than ever, humanity cries out and invokes peace, and it is a cry that demands reason and must not be stifled.”

Pope Leo urged every member of the international community to take up their moral responsibility to “stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable abyss.”

Reporting from San Francisco — When Hillary Clinton parachuted into Los Angeles recently, some of the well-heeled donors who swarmed her brought unsolicited campaign advice, while others brought ambitions of White House appointments. Susie Tompkins Buell brought a bag of dry-roasted chickpeas.

It was fitting that Buell, a wealthy San Franciscan who ranks near the top of the sprawling national network of Clinton benefactors, was obsessing about the candidate’s nourishment. Few people in the orbit of the Clintons have done more for their care and feeding than this 73-year-old fixture of Bay Area philanthropy and salon society who wanted nothing to do with politics — she didn’t even vote — until a chance meeting with Bill Clinton well into her adult life.

Buell not only has become a fundraising powerhouse since then. She has also become Hillary Clinton’s soul mate. Theirs is among a handful of friendships that have been key to fueling the candidate’s ambitions, providing emotional and financial sustenance. It reflects the uncanny Clinton ability to build and maintain unyielding loyalty from the people positioned to help them the most – even people, like Buell, who have no business interests or political aspirations the couple might advance. In many cases, the bonds have only solidified through the stresses of scandal, electoral disappointment and Democratic Party rivalries that the Clintons have powered through.

See the most-read stories this hour >>

The network has been most valuable in California, where Hillary Clinton is raising more cash than anyplace else. How Susie Tompkins Buell became a hub of that operation is a uniquely California story.

Buell never thought she would be rich. She was but a 21-year-old who had chosen work as a keno runner in Tahoe over college when she randomly stopped by the roadside to pick up Doug Tompkins, a hitchhiking beach bum who, like Buell, had an unexpected mastery of entrepreneurship and getting in front of trends. The two eventually married and together built a fortune and a cultish following around the clothing lines they created: North Face and Esprit.

But it wasn’t until they divorced and Buell found herself at a retreat at the Esalen Institute that she got curious about the Clintons. Buzz about Bill Clinton at that Big Sur haven of mindfulness intrigued Buell. It was 1991, and the fledgling presidential candidate had inspired one of the speakers at the event, New Urbanist architect and thinker Peter Calthorpe, with his ideas on building and strengthening community, a topic of interest to Buell.

Susie Tompkins Buell, poses with a poster she designed supporting Hillary Clinton for president at her penthouse apartment.

(David Butow / For the Times )

So on a whim, and with a stroke of luck in timing, she dropped in at an event for Clinton while passing through Sacramento on her way home from Tahoe.

She quickly found herself at the head table. The conversation was memorable.

“I told him I was getting divorced and how I had worked with my husband all these years,” Buell said. “He really wanted to know what it was like, and he started talking about Hillary and how she was nervous that night because she was giving a speech at Wellesley,” her alma mater. They talked about the crushing poverty Clinton had seen on the campaign trail, Buell recalled, “and how much people were relying on government. I really wanted a president who would look out for them.”

She decided at that moment it should be Clinton. The next day, she wrote him a $100,000 check.

But the Clinton campaign was confused. Such large gifts usually come with requests for face time with the candidate or, at the very least, donor perks like ticket packages to the party convention and star-studded fundraising events.

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“They asked me what I wanted,” she said. “I remember saying, ‘I want him to be president.’ I had no idea about how the money part of this worked.” Indeed, the only candidate who had ever received a cent from her before then was Mark Buell, the man who is now her husband and who long ago unsuccessfully ran for county supervisor. He got $500.

The donation to Clinton might have been a one-off but for the relationship that bloomed when Hillary Clinton approached Buell to personally thank her. The women clicked immediately, and Buell grew more enamored when she saw Clinton deliver an impassioned Mother’s Day address at Glide Memorial Church, a hotbed of leftist activism in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.

“I was attracted to Bill Clinton, but as soon as I met Hillary, it was much deeper for me,” she said.

Buell hasn’t stopped giving to the Clintons since. More than $15 million has made its way from Buell’s bank account to the campaigns and causes of the Clintons. Untold millions more have been raised by her, often at her gorgeous Pacific Heights penthouse apartment, a mandatory stop on the fundraising circuit for prominent liberals. The menu that iconic chef Alice Waters prepared when Bill Clinton dropped by in March 1996 is framed in the kitchen.

“I can’t even count the number of events I have been to at the house,” said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who first got to know Buell years ago, when he ran a wine shop and was good friends with her daughter. “It is a perfect venue overlooking the bay. There is an austerity to it. It is an opulent building, an opulent view. But the space itself is austere.” The rooms are sparsely but carefully appointed. Pieces worth more than a small condominium share rooms with stylish items plucked from far-flung flea markets. Every window has a panoramic view.

“It is a perfect backdrop to focus less on the surroundings and more on the occasion,” Newsom said.

The occasion is almost always political activism.

“The environment, women’s rights, children’s rights, equality, all of this,” said Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, ticking off in an interview the causes she has been involved in with Buell. “Susie comes through. She doesn’t say, ‘Put my name down,’ and take a back seat.”

As Buell got entrenched in politics, her relationship with Hillary Clinton began to move beyond it. Clinton writes in one of her books about a conversation between the two while the then-first lady was under siege by Congress amid its investigation into her Whitewater real estate investment. “My free-spirited friend Susie Buell said she didn’t follow all the dramas going on back in Washington, but she did have something to say to me: ‘Bless your heart.’ That was all I needed to hear,” Clinton wrote.

Much later, Clinton showed up at Buell’s apartment to meet her dying brother, a prominent surgeon who was staying with Buell while undergoing painful cancer treatments. “Most people would say, ‘I am sorry I never met your brother,’ or send their best. She just goes right into it,” Buell said. “She wasn’t taking advantage of him. They laughed. It was just sweet. It was one of the tenderest times in my life. … Her comfort with the situation was very moving.”

Buell said she regrets how few people see that side of Clinton.

“I remember once saying to her: ‘Can’t you just be yourself, Hillary?’ ” Buell said. “When there are not cameras around, she really lets it fly. She said, ‘You know what happens? They will get a moment of me expressing something and then say, “There she goes again, the crazy.” ’ Experience has trained her to be so cautious.”

But Clinton also sees a side of Buell that many candidates never get to see: the one that doesn’t talk politics.

“I don’t want to be one more thing she has to think about,” Buell said. “She knows who I am, she knows how I feel. We don’t talk shop. … She doesn’t need one more person to say, ‘What do you think about the Benghazi report?’ ”

This is the same donor who showed up at a high-stakes fundraiser for President Obama near the end of his first term and told him to knock off the small talk when he began to genuflect. Then she launched into a scold about his failure to get a landmark climate change bill through Congress.

“We don’t talk shop,” Susie Tompkins Buell says of her friendship with Hillary Clinton.

(David Butow / For the Times )

Newsom, who says Buell “holds your feet to the fire” when candidates get her support, let out a knowing chuckle when asked about her reluctance to push Clinton. As Buell and other climate activists fought for years to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, candidates who did not stand with them were getting an earful from her. Except Clinton, who stayed neutral through most of the battle.

“They have a deep friendship, and that transcends politics in many respects,” he said. “She has a loyalty to the Clintons that is extraordinary, and it is unbreakable.”

It’s not that Buell is star-struck. She is constantly in the company of celebrity. Meryl Streep gushed in an email about Buell’s “open, welcoming mien.” Waters happened to text while Buell was talking with a displaced former California reporter, and at Buell’s behest, recommended where in Washington to dine.

Bill Clinton emailed to say, “Susie has been my friend for almost 25 years,” and express gratitude “for her constant love and support for Hillary.”

And Gloria Steinem has also been Buell’s friend for years. She recalled in an interview coming to speak about feminism to Esprit employees in the 1980s, long before it was fashionable for big companies to try to raise the consciousness of their workforce. Buell’s then-husband vetoed her plans to advertise in the fledgling Ms. magazine, so Buell sidestepped him by writing a check to subsidize subscriptions for universities.

“She is a self-educated person in the best sense,” Steinem said.

Buell stopped selling clothing long ago, but she never stopped marketing her brand. Lately, she has been working on her “Badass for President” project, a more hipster-oriented line of Clinton campaign memorabilia than the less-daring goods sold in the campaign store. A mock-up poster in her office has the logo emblazoned over a black-and-white photo of young Hillary Clinton in stylish ’60s attire and a coffeehouse conversation pose.

The fundraising events she holds are among the fastest-selling tickets in the city — especially when they are at her apartment in the penthouse of a landmark red-tile-roof building on a Pacific Heights hilltop where the views are dreamlike and the history is rich.

Buell says she was one of the lonely Democrats in the old-money-heavy building when she held her first fundraiser for Bill Clinton there. She had to quickly patch together a bunch of linens to cover the picture windows that the president’s detail warned would be a security risk. Clinton joked that it was better to be looking at the linens than shattered glass. The Secret Service once got stuck in the utility elevator there for an hour after too many of the agents piled in.

They know their way around better now. There are at least three other big Democratic donors in the building now, and sometimes they team up to hold multifloor events. Obama once joked that he had been through so many times he was starting to feel like a resident. Buell expects that she and her neighbors soon will be holding another multitiered event in the building for Hillary Clinton soon. The haul from such events is in the millions of dollars.

“It works great,” she said. “As long as the Secret Service is clear that they can’t all pile into the utility elevator at once.”

And what’s next for Buell if Clinton wins? Probably more of the same, she said.

“I am absolutely not interested in getting appointed to something,” she said. “I have the perfect life.”

[email protected]

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WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday that America “does not seek war” with Iran in the aftermath of a surprise attack overnight on three of that country’s nuclear sites while Vice President JD Vance said the strikes have given Tehran a renewed chance of negotiating with Washington.

The mission, called “Operation Midnight Hammer,” involved decoys and deception, and met with no Iranian resistance, Hegseth and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference.

“This mission was not and has not been about regime change,” Hegseth added.

Caine said the goal of the operation — destroying nuclear sites in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan — had been achieved.

“Final battle damage will take some time, but initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction,” Caine said.

Vance said in a television interview that while he would not discuss “sensitive intelligence about what we’ve seen on the ground,” he felt “very confident that we’ve substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon.”

Pressed further, he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “I think that we have really pushed their program back by a very long time. I think that it’s going to be many many years before the Iranians are able to develop a nuclear weapon.”

The vice president said the U.S. had “negotiated aggressively’ with Iran to try to find a peaceful settlement and that Trump made his decision after assessing the Iranians were not acting “in good faith.”

“I actually think it provides an opportunity to reset this relationship, reset these negotiations and get us in a place where Iran can decide not to be a threat to its neighbors, not to a threat to the United States and if they’re willing to do that, the United States is all ears,” Vance said.

He added: “The Iranians can go down the path of peace or they can go down the path of this ridiculous brinkmanship of funding terrorism, of trying to build a nuclear weapon and that’s just not something the United States can accept.”

Much of the world is absorbing the consequences of the strikes and the risk that they could lead to more fighting across the Middle East after the United States inserted itself into the war between Israel and Iran. Airstrikes starting on June 12 by Israel that targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities and generals prompted retaliation from Iran.

While U.S. officials urged for caution and stressed that only nuclear sites were targeted by Washington, Iran criticized the actions as a violation of its sovereignty and international law.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Sunday that Washington was “fully responsible” for whatever actions Tehran may take in response.

“They crossed a very big red line by attacking nuclear facilities,” he said at a news conference in Turkey. “I don’t know how much room is left for diplomacy.”

Both Russia and China condemned the U.S. attack. Araghchi said he would travel to Moscow later Sunday to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. A Turkish Foreign Ministry statement warned about the risk of the conflict spreading beyond the Middle East to “a global level.”

The Pentagon briefing did not provide any new details about Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Hegseth said the timeline was the result of a schedule set by President Donald Trump for talks with Iran about its nuclear ambitions.

“Iran found out” that when Trump “says 60 days that he seeks peace and negotiation, he means 60 days of peace and negotiation,” Hegseth said. “Otherwise, that nuclear program, that new nuclear capability will not exist. He meant it.”

That statement was complicated as the White House had suggested last Thursday that Trump could take as much as two weeks to determine whether to strike Iran or continue to pursue negotiations. But the U.S. benefited from Iran’s weakened air defenses as it was able to conduct the attacks without resistance from Iran.

“Iran’s fighters did not fly, and it appears that Iran’s surface to air missile systems did not see us throughout the mission,” Caine said.

Hegseth said that a choice to move a number of B-2 bombers from their base in Missouri earlier Saturday was meant to be a decoy to throw off Iranians. He added that the U.S. used other methods of deception as well, deploying fighters to protect the B-2 bombers that dropped 14 bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s site at Fordo.

The strikes occurred Saturday between 6:40 pm and 7:05 pm in Washington, or roughly 2:10 am on Sunday in Iran.

Pesoli and Boak write for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — By outward appearances, Arief and Soraya Wiriadinata led a modest life. He was a landscape architect, she was a homemaker. They lived in a wood-shingle townhouse in a suburban Virginia working-class neighborhood favored by taxi drivers and government workers.

“I considered them a quiet, reserved couple,” said a former neighbor who could recall no signs of wealth or elite connections.

In particular, they had not been politically active and, according to government campaign-finance reports, had not contributed money to a political campaign until November. But in that month, the Wiriadinatas each wrote a $15,000 check to the Democratic National Committee. The next month they wrote six more checks, totaling $100,000.

Then they disappeared from the United States, returning to their homeland of Indonesia. But that didn’t stop their political largess. The checks kept coming to the DNC. By June they had contributed $425,000–a huge individual sum–more than movie-maker Steven Spielberg, more than AT&T;, more even than the Assn. of Trial Lawyers of America.

And they left behind a mystery that is now at the center of a mushrooming controversy that has spilled into the U.S. presidential race.

Are the Wiriadinatas, as the DNC maintains, an extraordinary embodiment of political philanthropy, motivated solely by President Clinton’s concern for an ailing relative and their desire to see the incumbent reelected?

Or, as the president’s critics suggest, might the couple be a deceptive front for wealthy foreigners–such as Soraya’s now-deceased father, Hashim Ning–who sought to buy influence in American politics but who were prohibited by law from contributing money to U.S. election campaigns?

DNC officials insist that the contributions from the Wiriadinatas, who were legal immigrants in the United States, were legal and proper.

Republicans are asking: Where did they get all that money?

Clinton Links

At this point the questions far outnumber the answers, with the Wiriadinatas silent and out of touch overseas and with the DNC fund-raiser who solicited their money declining all interviews, responding only through intermediaries with specific written answers to written questions.

But several intriguing elements are feeding the tempest, which swirls in the hyper-charged atmosphere of the nearing presidential election.

They include Clinton’s ties to Indonesian business people. Soraya Wiriadinata’s father was a partner of one of Indonesia’s wealthiest men, Mochtar Riady. Riady’s banking, real estate and insurance interests have stretched from Jakarta to Little Rock, Ark., and his family has enjoyed an unusually close relationship to Clinton.

Also, there is the fact that the DNC fund-raiser involved, John Huang, is the same one who brought in an illegal $250,000 contribution from a company in South Korea. When the foreign source of the donation was identified, the DNC returned the money.

And there is the hiring of Clinton confidant Webster L. Hubbell by one of Riady’s enterprises after Hubbell resigned as the No. 3 official in the Justice Department and before he went to jail for defrauding his Arkansas law firm.

Seeking to raise the political stakes, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) called Sunday for congressional inquiries and maintained that a special counsel would have to be appointed to investigate the affair.

“This is a potential abuse of the American system on behalf of an Indonesia billionaire in a way that we have never seen in American history,” Gingrich said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation.” “It’s almost unthinkable.”

Vice President Al Gore, asked to respond to these issues on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” said: “There have been absolutely no violations of any law or regulations. . . . There is nothing that has been done that’s wrong.”

Influence-Buying?

Regardless of who is right, the Indonesian connection strikes a particularly sensitive nerve in the American body politic–the concern that foreigners will find ways to buy influence in domestic U.S. politics. The same fears were triggered two decades ago with the investigation of South Korean government influence-buying in Congress by flamboyant businessman Tongsun Park.

In recent years, Riady family members and the U.S. subsidiaries and executives of the family’s company, the Lippo Group, which includes Los Angeles-based Lippo Bank, have contributed lavishly to the Democratic Party. The Lippo Group’s clout is such that some Washington-based diplomats have questioned whether it has tried to use its connections to influence American policies toward Asia to benefit its financial interests.

Since Clinton embarked on his initial presidential bid in 1991, members of the Riady family and Lippo Group’s American subsidiaries and executives have contributed more than $475,000 to the Democratic Party and its candidates, according to a study of Federal Election Commission records done for The Times by the Campaign Study Group of Springfield, Va.

Mochtar Riady is barred by law from giving to U.S. campaigns because he is not a U.S. resident. But his son, James Riady, a longtime friend of Clinton, lived in the United States legally in 1991 and 1992, when he and his family gave $100,525 to the Democrats. James Riady has since returned to Indonesia.

At the nexus of the relationship between the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party, the Wiriadinatas and the Riadys is Huang, a former president of Lippo Group U.S.A.

Huang left Lippo Group in 1994 to serve as the Commerce Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international economic policy for 18 months. He then joined the DNC, where he is vice chairman of the national finance committee. Huang specializes in raising money from Asian American donors–and he handled the Wiriadinatas contributions.

He has raised several million dollars this election cycle, according to Democratic sources.

Huang also was responsible for a $250,000 contribution from the American subsidiary of a South Korean company–a contribution that proved to be illegal because the subsidiary had not done any business in the United States. The DNC returned the contribution after The Times raised questions about it.

Huang’s most stunning fund-raising success may have been the Wiriadinatas.

Origin of Donations

Huang, in his written responses to questions from The Times, said he met the Wiriadinatas when he visited Ning–who had suffered a heart attack during a visit here–at a Virginia hospital in June 1995. Huang had known Ning, founder of his own group of Indonesian companies, from their mutual association with Riady and Lippo.

Huang said the Wiriadinatas subsequently “expressed an interest in supporting the Democratic Party and the president, and I suggested that they contribute to the DNC.”

In November, the couple attended a dinner at which Gore spoke, and gave their $15,000 donations. In December, Arief Wiriadinata participated in a DNC breakfast at the White House with Clinton, apparently at Huang’s invitation, said DNC spokeswoman Amy Weiss Tobe.

In a Feb. 21 form letter on DNC stationery, Clinton thanked Wiriadinata for “recently meeting with me at the White House. I enjoyed having the chance to talk to you.”

Asked about the Wiriadinatas’ generosity, Huang wrote he had “absolutely no reason to question whether the money they were contributing belonged to them” because they resided in Virginia and were legal U.S. residents.

In addition, he said, Arief Wiriadinata had a master’s degree in engineering from an Ivy League university (the University of Pennsylvania) and worked as a landscape architect, and Soraya was the daughter of the founder of a major enterprise and “to my knowledge has very substantial resources of her own.”

Under federal law, foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to a U.S. election campaign unless they are legal residents here.

Gordon M. Bava, principal attorney for Lippo Bank of California, said Huang “certainly knew potential donors in the Asian community,” but that he would never violate campaign fund-raising laws.

“I never saw any evidence of that,” Bava said. “Based on my personal knowledge of him and his ethics, I would be very surprised if he was engaged in any such activity.”

Ning initially recuperated from his heart attack and returned to Indonesia, where he died in December. The Wiriadinatas returned home shortly after to be with their family, Huang said. A neighbor recalled that Arief Wiriadinata told him he was “going back home to work for his family.”

But they continued their contributions to the campaign in the United States. Following their departure, the Wiriadinatas made another 15 donations totaling $295,000, according to reports filed by the DNC with the FEC.

All told, the couple wrote 23 separate checks of $5,000 to $25,000 between Nov. 9, 1995, and June 7, 1996. Fifteen were signed by Arief Wiriadinata and eight by his wife.

Seen as Gratitude

DNC and White House officials described the donations as expressions of gratitude for get-well letters the White House sent to Ning when he was hospitalized.

Mark D. Fabiani, special associate White House counsel, said two form letters were sent on behalf of Clinton, both signed by an auto-pen rather than by the president personally. The first, a brief note on June 19, 1995, expressed regret about Ning’s health problems and wished him well. When Ning replied with encouraging news about his recovery, the White House sent a second letter on Clinton’s behalf to Jakarta on Nov. 8.

National DNC Chairman Don Fowler said in an interview last month that the Wiriadinatas were so touched that they made their six-figure contributions.

“It seemed to them a significant courtesy,” Fowler said. “That’s the only linkage we could find.”

Even though many of the contributions apparently came from Indonesia, all of the DNC contribution reports filed with the elections commission indicate the Wiriadinatas were residing in Virginia at the time–heightening suspicions about the money’s true origin.

Tobe said the addresses, however, were apparently taken from the couple’s checks and party donor card. Donors may send contributions from overseas if they maintain their legal-resident status.

The Riadys’ relationship with Clinton, meanwhile, goes back to the late 1970s, when patriarch Mochtar Riady’s son, James, did an internship with an investment bank in Little Rock. James later moved to Arkansas in the mid-1980s to help run an institution named Worthen Bank, which was then partly owned by his family.

White House Meetings

The Riadys and Clinton have maintained the relationship since the president’s move to Washington. Three months after Clinton’s inauguration, James Riady and two other associates, including Huang, met with Clinton briefly at the White House, according to Fabiani. And, in September 1995, Clinton met at the White House for about 20 minutes with James Riady, Huang and Little Rock attorney C. Joseph Giroir Jr., whose development company does joint ventures with Lippo. Just last month, James Riady met with Clinton and others at the White House. Fabiani described the three Oval Office sessions as “meet and greet” social visits.

In November 1994, during a Clinton trip to Jakarta for a summit meeting, the president visited for about 15 minutes with Mochtar and James Riady at a reception they were hosting, Fabiani said.

Meanwhile, the Lippo Group had a relationship with the administration. A business partner was included in a trade mission led by the late Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown; during the trip, the company’s Hong Kong affiliate and the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. signed a $1-billion business deal to build a power plant in China.

Fabiani said the Riadys “have been longtime supporters of the president.” He added that “we have no indication that the White House was lobbied” on banking, trade or any other matters by the Riadys or their representatives.

Lippo Bank, formerly known as the Bank of Trade, was acquired by the Riady family of Indonesia in 1984. The Los Angeles-based bank also has branches in San Jose, Westminster and San Francisco. In the early 1990s, Lippo Bank was primarily engaged in assisting the shipment of goods from Indonesia to the United States.

The bank is a unit of Lippo Group, one of the top five Indonesian conglomerates with interests in financial services, urban development, manufacturing and retail. It has estimated assets of $5 billion to $6 billion and businesses located in Indonesia, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Australia and North America. The conglomerate employs more than 30,000 people.

The Lippo Bank came under investigation in 1994 by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which completed a money-laundering examination by gaining the bank’s agreement to keep precise track of the origin and destination of cash deposits at the institution.

Bava, the Lippo Bank of California attorney, said he was prohibited by law from speaking about the FDIC action, but he criticized various reports that the bank had laundered money.

“Those allegations are totally, completely false,” he said. “The bank was never accused of or involved in any money-laundering activities. Nor were any of its officers, directors or employees. If there were that kind of allegation made, it would most likely have been based on deficiencies in record-keeping–that is, filing reports with the Treasury Department.”

Bava said the nature of Lippo Bank’s business could lead to lapses in record-keeping. He said the bank handled many small retail accounts that operate on a cash basis.

“They have a large number of deposits,” he said. “As the bank was expanding, it is certainly possible if there were any deficiencies, the large number of cash transactions perhaps got a little ahead of their [administrative] controls.”

In September, Lippo Group won shareholder approval for a controversial $364-million restructuring in which Lippo Life will buy 40% of Lippo Bank from the Riady family, which controls both companies. Investors initially protested that the purchase price for the Lippo Bank stake was excessive, saying they were being forced to buy out the Riadys at a premium to market prices. Analysts saw the transaction as an attempt by the Riadys to raise cash for their personal use from the listed companies they control.

Numerous players associated with the Lippo Group have been major donors to the Democrats and Democratic candidates since Jan. 1, 1991, according to the analysis for The Times.

In addition to James Riady and the Wiriadinatas, Huang and his wife, Jane, gave $162,494 and Lippo Securities President Charles Dequeljoe and his wife, Susan, $70,500. Other individuals and companies associated with Lippo contributed another $74,500. Giroir, who was instrumental in the Entergy deal, and his wife and company gave $83,250. And Entergy and its employees donated $283,463.

Times staff writers Sara Fritz, Jim Mann and Josh Greenberg in Washington and Duke Helfand and Sonia Nazario in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

* GINGRICH QUESTIONS FUNDS: House speaker criticizes donations to Democratic Party. A23

Today we discuss presidential politics, window treatments and disasters of the natural and man-made variety.

Time for Gavin Newsom to start measuring those White House drapes.

Huh?

You know, president of the United States. I’m thinking something Earth-friendly, like recycled hemp.

Wait, what?

Did you catch the nationally televised speech the governor recently gave? The one about “democracy at a crossroads.”

I did.

It was a fine speech and the governor made some important points about President Trump’s reckless commandeering of California’s National Guard, his administration’s indiscriminate immigration raids and the wholly unnecessary dispatch of Marines to Los Angeles. (From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Venice Beach.)

Newsom was plenty justified in his anger and contempt. Trump, acting true to his flame-fanning fashion, turned what was a middling set of protests — nothing local law enforcement couldn’t handle — into yet another assault on our sorely tested Constitution.

Newsom’s speech certainly “met the moment,” to use one of his favorite phrases.

I’ll grant you that. Unlike a lot of extracurricular activities aimed at boosting his presidential prospects, Newsom was addressing a Trump-manufactured crisis unfolding right here at home. It was a moment that called for gubernatorial leadership.

Just the kind of leadership despondent Democrats need.

So it’s been said.

It’s not much of a leap to see Newsom leading the anti-Trump opposition clear to the White House!

Actually, that’s a bigger leap than it takes to clear the Grand Canyon.

Granted, Newsom’s speech received a lot of raves from Democrats across the country. Many are desperate for someone in a position of power to give voice to their blood-boiling, cranium-exploding rage against Trump and his many excesses. Newsom did a good job channeling those emotions and articulating the dangers of an imprudent president run amok.

But let’s not go overboard.

There is no lack of Democrats eager to take on Trump and become the face of the so-called resistance. There is no shortage of Democrats eyeing a 2028 bid for the White House. Those who run won’t be schlepping all the political baggage that Newsom has to tote.

Such as?

Rampant homelessness. An exploding budget deficit. Vast income inequality.

Plus, a lot of social policies that many Californians consider beneficent and broad-minded that, to put it mildly, others around the country consider much less so. Don’t get me wrong. I love California with all my heart and soul. But we have a lot of deep-seated problems and cultural idiosyncrasies that Newsom’s rivals — Democrat and Republican — would be only too happy to hang around his neck.

So let’s not get too caught up in the moment. The fundamentals of the 2028 presidential race haven’t changed based on a single — albeit well-received — speech. It’s still hard to see Democrats turning the party’s fate over to yet another nominee spawned in the liberal stew of San Francisco politics and campaigning with kooky California as a home address.

Stranger things have happened.

True.

That said, 2028 is a zillion political light years and countless news cycles away. First come the midterm elections in November 2026, giving voters their chance to weigh in on Trump and his actions. The verdict will go a long way toward shaping the dynamic in 2028.

Well at least Newsom has brought his A-game to social media. His trolling of Trump is something to behold!

Whatever.

You’re not impressed?

I think it’s best to leave the snark to professionals.

I do, however, have some sympathy for the governor. It’s not easy dealing with someone as spiteful and amoral as the nation’s ax-grinder-in-chief.

Consider, for instance, the disaster relief money that fire-devastated Southern California is counting on. Helping the region in its time of desperate need shouldn’t be remotely political, or part of some red-vs.-blue-state feud. Historically, that sort of federal aid has never been.

But this is Trump we’re dealing with.

To his credit, Newsom tried making nice in the days and weeks following the January firestorm. He ignored the president’s provocations and held what was later described an an amicable session with Trump in the Oval Office. Their working relationship seemed to be a good one.

But few things last with the transactional Trump, save for his pettiness and self-absorption. Asked last week if his “recent dust-ups” with Newsom would impact the granting of wildfire relief, Trump said, “Yeah, maybe.”

He called Newsom incompetent, trotted out more gobbledygook about raking forests and then soliloquized on the nature of personal relationships. “When you don’t like somebody, don’t respect somebody, it’s harder for that person to get money if you’re on top,” Trump said.

Yeesh.

Responding in a posting on X, Newsom correctly noted, “Sucking up to the President should not be a requirement for him to do the right thing for the American people.”

Hard to argue with that.

Yet here we are.

The nation’s second-most populous city is occupied by National Guard and Marine troops. Thousands of people — displaced by disaster, their past lives gone up in smoke — are hostage to the whims of a peevish president who always puts his feelings first and cares nothing for the greater good.

The midterm election can’t come soon enough.

Reporting from Washington — President Obama and Hillary Clinton both expressed surprise Thursday that a $400-million cash payment to Iran early this year has suddenly become an issue in the presidential campaign.

After all, Obama had publicly disclosed the payment to Iran at a White House news conference in January called to announce implementation of the historic Iran nuclear deal.

At a news conference Thursday at the Pentagon, Obama did little to hide his bemusement at having to answer questions about the payment.

“There wasn’t a secret,” he said. “We announced [it] to all of you.”

He described the money as the return of Iranian funds from a dispute dating back to the 1970s.

The administration could not send the money in dollars or send a wire transfer of funds because of U.S. sanctions, Obama said, so the money was delivered in other currencies

“We couldn’t send them a check,” he said.

The president flatly rejected allegations that the $400 million was a ransom for four Americans who were released from Iranian custody at about the same time.

The idea that the U.S. would have paid ransom “defies logic,” Obama said, and would have betrayed the families of other Americans held unjustly around the world — many of whom he has met with personally.

He took the opportunity to defend the landmark nuclear accord that the U.S.-led international coalition reached with Iran more than a year ago. The agreement has “worked exactly the way we said it was going to work,” he said.

The impetus for renewed questions about a publicly announced settlement was a Wall Street Journal account of the transaction, which revealed that the $400 million was “converted into other currencies, stacked onto the wooden pallets and delivered to Iran on an unmarked cargo plane,” as the paper described it.

The existence of the deal itself was indeed disclosed and reported in real time, covered by the Los Angeles Times and others.

But what’s old can still be news, especially given the pace of the modern news cycle. Put it in the midst of a presidential campaign and all bets are off.

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has questioned the payment for two days.

“I woke up yesterday and I saw $400 million dollars, different currencies, they probably don’t want our currency,” Trump said Thursday in Portland, Maine. “Four hundred million dollars being flown to Iran. I mean, folks what’s going on here? What is going on?”

Trump again cited a video that he said shows an “airplane coming in and the money coming off.”

“That was given to us has to be by the Iranians,” he said. “You know why the tape was given to us? Because they want to embarrass our country. They want to embarrass our country. And they want to embarrass our president.”

But his campaign has acknowledged to CBS News that the video, in fact, shows Americans landing in Geneva, Switzerland, and wasn’t provided by Iran.

Stephen Miller, a senior policy advisor to Trump’s campaign, still insisted that “nothing less than a full investigation is required.”

“This administration has embarrassed our country as no administration has before, going so far as to fund Islamic terror through cash payments to Iran,” he said in a statement.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) raised concerns that the report confirmed suspicions that the money was paid as ransom for the release of several U.S. citizens, including journalist Jason Rezaian, held by Iran.

Iran said it was owed the money from an unfulfilled contract for U.S. fighter jets that the previous, U.S.-backed government had paid to the Pentagon. The aircraft were never delivered after the shah of Iran was deposed in the 1979 revolution.

Ryan said if it were a ransom payment, it would “mark another chapter in the ongoing saga of misleading the American people” to sell the international agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear development program.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest denied that the money was paid as ransom.

“The United States does not pay ransoms,” he said. “The only people who are making that suggestion are right-wingers in Iran who don’t like the deal, and Republicans in the United States that don’t like the deal.”

Clinton, who stepped down as secretary of State several years before the payment was made, bluntly described it as “old news” in an interview with a Colorado television station.

“So far as I know, it had nothing to do with any kind of hostage swap or any other tit for tat,” she said.

Republicans were only reviving the issue “because they want to continue to criticize the [nuclear] agreement, and I think they are wrong about that.”

“I have said the agreement has made the world safer, but it has to be enforced. And I’ve spoken out very strongly about how I will enforce this agreement,” she added. “I will hold the Iranians to account for even the smallest violation, and that’s exactly what I think needs to happen.”

[email protected]

For more White House coverage, follow @mikememoli on Twitter.

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UPDATES:

3:40 p.m.: This story was updated with comments by President Obama and Donald Trump.

The first version of this post was published at 11 a.m.

John McCain’s presidential campaign Tuesday accused the Los Angeles Times of “intentionally suppressing” a videotape it obtained of a 2003 banquet where then-state Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his friendship with Rashid Khalidi, a leading Palestinian scholar and activist.

The Times first reported on the videotape in an April 2008 story about Obama’s ties with Palestinians and Jews as he navigated the politics of Chicago. The report included a detailed description of the tape, but the newspaper did not make the video public.

“A major news organization is intentionally suppressing information that could provide a clearer link between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi,” said McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb. “ . . . The election is one week away, and it’s unfortunate that the press so obviously favors Barack Obama that this campaign must publicly request that the Los Angeles Times do its job — make information public.”

The Times on Tuesday issued a statement about its decision not to post the tape.

“The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it,” said the newspaper’s editor, Russ Stanton. “The Times keeps its promises to sources.”

Jamie Gold, the newspaper’s readers’ representative, said in a statement: “More than six months ago the Los Angeles Times published a detailed account of the events shown on the videotape. The Times is not suppressing anything. Just the opposite — the L.A. Times brought the matter to light.”

The original article said that Obama’s friendships with Palestinian Americans in Chicago and his presence at Palestinian community events had led some to think he was sympathetic to the Palestinian viewpoint on Middle East politics. Obama publicly expresses a pro-Israel viewpoint that pleases many Jewish leaders.

In reporting on Obama’s presence at the dinner for Khalidi, the article noted that some speakers expressed anger at Israel and at U.S. foreign policy, but that Obama in his comments called for finding common ground.

It said that Khalidi in the 1970s often spoke to reporters on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Khalidi later lived near Obama while teaching at the University of Chicago. He is now a professor of Arab studies at Columbia University in New York.

This year’s presidential race will be won or lost in a handful of states that have swung between Democrats and Republicans over the years. Here’s our guide to the battlegrounds and how their political landscapes could hand them to either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

For each state we’ve included the estimated percentage of the electorate that is white (a group that favors Trump overall), the percentage of white college-educated voters (a subset typically won by Republicans but now leaning toward Clinton) and the results in 2008 and 2012. The figures come from the Cook Political Report.

Florida is where close presidential contests are won or lost, sometimes by razor-thin margins. (See: Bush vs. Gore and the hanging chad).

There are signs that Clinton is positioned to edge out a victory here. For starters, the state’s significant Latino population is changing — there are more Puerto Ricans, who often lean Democratic, and fewer Cuban Americans, who are more reliable Republican voters.

Could Trump still win here? The part-time Floridian, whose Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach has been the site of numerous campaign events, needs turnout among black and Latino voters to lag behind previous elections.

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Ohio has a well-earned reputation as a political bellwether — it’s voted for the winner in every presidential contest except one since 1944.

But this year could be different. First, the state’s population is less representative of the nation than before, becoming older and whiter as the rest of the country diversifies. That should be a boost for Trump.

However, he’s been unable to unify the state’s Republican Party around his candidacy, and not even the state’s popular governor, John Kasich, voted for him. 

North Carolina tends to be out of Democrats’ reach in presidential elections — Obama won, barely, in 2008, then lost in 2012. But Clinton seems intent on turning the state blue with the help of high-profile supporters such as President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. 

A major issue has been protests in Charlotte after police fatally shot a black man, pulling the city into a nationwide debate over race and criminal justice. It’s possible the political ripples could benefit Clinton, who has pushed for policing reforms and is counting on strong support from black voters.

 As one of the whitest states in the country, Iowa is fertile terrain for Trump, who has struggled with black, Latino and Asian voters. He could also benefit from a united Republican front that has eluded him in some other battlegrounds.

Clinton doesn’t have a strong track record in the state. She lost the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses in 2008 when she ran against Obama, then narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders this year.

Pennsylvania has been a blue state for more than two decades,but there were concerns among Democrats that Trump could boost his numbers with white, working-class voters.

That doesn’t seem to have materialized, and Clinton has maintained a strong base of support among black voters in places such as Philadelphia. The city is such a Democratic bastion that Mitt Romney didn’t earn a single vote in 59 precincts in 2012.

In addition, Clinton’s campaign has set its sights on the Philadelphia suburbs, where Republicans are usually more competitive but Trump has struggled.

It wasn’t long ago that Democrats were ready to write off Colorado.  But the state has been rapidly transformed by an influx of Latinos and young, highly educated transplants — demographics that make it a much safer bet for Clinton.

Also hurting Trump is his low support among women disgusted with his sexist remarks. Even though he may be able count on support from conservative strongholds such as Colorado Springs, the growing suburbs around Denver could be slipping out of Republicans’ reach.

Trump’s name already looms over Las Vegas from the candidate’s hotel, but winning the state is another matter. Nevada is home to an increasing number of Latinos who have been turned off by Trump’s hard-line immigration stance and his derogatory comments about Mexicans and other immigrants.

The Clinton campaign has invested heavily in a state organization to balance out the enthusiasm among Trump supporters. Voters here have a strong anti-establishment streak, something the New York businessman and first-time candidate could turn to his advantage.

Democrats have regarded Georgia like a big, fat, juicy peach, just waiting to ripen and fall. Their expectation has been the increased clout of the state’s growing black, Latino and Asian populations would turn this reddest of states blue sometime over the next decade or so.

Some hope that day could come this year if Trump repels enough minority and women voters. However, it’s less than an even-money bet for Clinton. 

Donald Trump’s steady slide in the polls has made this normally Republican state vulnerable to turning blue this year. He’s lost the support of Sen. John McCain, and he was never endorsed by the state’s other senator, Jeff Flake.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is trying to take advantage of a rare opportunity, with appearances by First Lady Michelle Obama, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and the candidate herself. A Democratic victory would likely rely heavily on Arizona’s growing number of Latinos, who have heavily favored Clinton over Trump.

[email protected]

Twitter: @chrismegerian

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As president, Ronald Reagan spoke movingly of the shock and horror he felt as part of a military film crew documenting firsthand the atrocities of the Nazi death camps.

The story wasn’t true.

Years later, an adamant, finger-wagging Bill Clinton looked straight into a live TV camera and told the American people he never had sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

He was lying.

Presidents of all stripes and both major political parties have bent, massaged or shaded the truth, elided uncomfortable facts or otherwise misled the public — unwittingly or, sometimes, very purposefully.

Trump and Congress may make it easier to get drugs approved — even if they don’t work »

“It’s not surprising,” said Charles Lewis, a journalism professor at American University who wrote a book chronicling presidential deceptions. “It’s as old as time itself.”

But White House scholars and other students of government agree there has never been a president like Donald Trump, whose volume of falsehoods, misstatements and serial exaggerations — on matters large and wincingly small — place him “in a class by himself,” as Texas A&M’s George Edwards put it.

“He is by far the most mendacious president in American history,” said Edwards, a political scientist who edits the scholarly journal Presidential Studies Quarterly. (His assessment takes in the whole of Trump’s hyperbolic history, as the former real estate developer and reality TV personality has only been in office since Jan. 20.)

Edwards then amended his assertion.

“I say ‘mendacious,’ which implies that he’s knowingly lying. That may be unfair,” Edwards said. “He tells more untruths than any president in American history.”

The caveat underscores the fraught use of the L-word, requiring, as it does, the certainty that someone is consciously presenting something as true that they know to be false. While there may be plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest a person is lying, short of crawling inside their head it is difficult to say with absolutely certainty.

When Trump incessantly talks of rampant voter fraud, boasts about the size of his inaugural audience or claims to have seen thousands of people on rooftops in New Jersey celebrating the Sept. 11 attacks, all are demonstrably false. “But who can say if he actually believes it,” asked Lewis, “or whether he’s gotten the information from some less-than-reliable news site?”

Reagan, who is now among the most beloved of former presidents, was famous for embroidering the truth, especially in the homespun anecdotes he loved to share.

In the case of the Nazi death camps, there was some basis for his claim to be an eyewitness to history: Serving stateside in Culver City during World War II, Reagan was among those who processed raw footage from the camps. In the sympathetic telling, the barbarity struck so deeply that Reagan years later assumed he had been present for the liberation.

Even when he admitted wrongdoing in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, which cast a dark stain on his administration, Reagan did so in a way that suggested he never meant to deceive.

“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages,” Reagan said in a prime-time address from the Oval Office. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

Clinton, who famously parsed and tweezed the English language with surgical precision, offered a straight-up confession when admitting he lied about his extramarital affair with Lewinsky, which helped lead to his impeachment.

“I misled people, including even my wife,” Clinton said, a slight quaver in his voice as he delivered a nationwide address. “I deeply regret that.”

President Obama took his turn apologizing for promising “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it” under the Affordable Care Act; millions of Americans found that not to be true, and PolitiFact, the nonpartisan truth-squad organization, bestowed the dubious 2013 “Lie of the Year” honor for Obama’s repeated falsehood.

“We weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place,” Obama said in an NBC interview. “I am sorry that so many are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.”

Speaking at CIA headquarters, President Trump falsely accused the media of creating a feud between himself and the intelligence community.

(Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)

Trump, by contrast, has steadfastly refused to back down, much less apologize, for his copious misstatements. Rather, he typically repeats his claims, often more strenuously, and lashes out at those who point out contrary evidence.

“There’s a degree of shamelessness I’ve never seen before,” said Lewis, the American University professor, echoing a consensus among other presidential scholars. “There’s not a whole lot of contrition there.”

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, has suggested Trump is unfairly being held to a more skeptical standard by a hostile press corps. “I’ve never seen it like this,” he said at one of his earliest briefings. “The default narrative is always negative, and it’s demoralizing.”

Gil Troy, a historian at Montreal’s McGill University, agreed the relationship between the president and those taking down his words has changed from the days when a new occupant of the White House enjoyed a more lenient standard — at least at the start of an administration — which allowed for the benefit of the doubt.

That, Troy said, is both Trump’s fault — “he brings a shamelessness and blatancy” to his prevarications that is without precedent — and the result of a press corps “that feels much more emboldened, much more bruised, much angrier” after the antagonism of his presidential campaign.

Since taking office, there has been no less hostility from on high; rather, echoing his pugnacious political strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, Trump has declared the media to be the “opposition party.”

“We’re watching the birth pangs of a new press corps and a new series of protocols for covering the president,” Troy said.

It is sure to be painful all around.

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@markzbarabak

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SAN DIEGO — President Clinton arrived here Monday pledging again to make special efforts to help Californians with their economic problems but asking that they in turn agree to the sacrifices demanded in his pending budget plan.

Clinton, beginning a two-day campaign-style swing through the West to gather support for his agenda, reminded a crowd of several hundred that greeted him at the North Island Naval Air Station that he had vowed his help for California’s problems during his campaign.

“We are going to work our hearts out in Washington in order to move this state together,” he said. And he cited his proposals to foster defense conversion, to provide federal support for California’s special immigration problems and to stimulate the economy in a way that would help California’s ailing real estate industry and small businesses.

“California needs an economic strategy that will be built from the grass roots up, but will have a partner in the White House,” he declared, adding, “the federal government’s going to do more to pay our fair share.”

At the same time, Clinton renewed his call for Americans to support his budget against resistance from congressional Republicans and others.

“When you hear people say ‘No, no, no,’ ask where they were for the last 12 years,” he said. Referring to his Republican predecessors, he said “the most popular thing to do in public life is to cut taxes and raise spending. But sooner or later your string runs out.”

Clinton’s appearance began the second straight week of forays into the country to drum up support for an economic program that has lost ground in the polls. On Monday evening he was scheduled to take questions from the public in a live, hourlong TV “town hall” broadcast from San Diego’s KGTV, Channel 10. Today he is to visit Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys to talk about worker retraining, and later to stop at a business on Florence Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles to promote his plans for urban redevelopment.

He spent much of Monday at a stop in Los Alamos, N. M., pointing to the Los Alamos National Laboratories, where the atomic bomb was developed during World War II, as proof of the potential of his five-year, $20-billion defense conversion plan.

Clinton said the 50-year-old laboratory’s early move into commercial enterprises proves that defense industries can be successfully converted to commercial use in the aftermath of the Cold War. But he also used the occasion to stress his No. 1 theme, that Congress needs to pass his economic program to cut the deficit and step up spending that will strengthen the economy.

In remarks at Los Alamos High School, Clinton said the 7,600-employee nuclear laboratory had made important contributions to the weapons research that kept pressure on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He said that in the last several years the lab’s efforts to find commercial applications for its research had spawned 30 companies and 100 government-industry partnerships.

Clinton said such relationships would begin the kind of “economic chain reaction” that could help the nation create high paying jobs.

The laboratory, with an annual budget of $1 billion, conducts commercial research into batteries, oil recovery, advanced materials and other such projects. Clinton cited its advances in the process called ion implantation, which is used to make stronger materials and which grew out of research begun on the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” launched by President Ronald Reagan.

Only last week, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin declared an official end to the “Star Wars” program. But Clinton acknowledged: “Something good came out of it, because people were looking to break down frontiers.”

But as he spoke about defense conversion, Clinton repeatedly moved into discussion of the need for sacrifices to cut the federal deficit. “Everybody’s for deficit reduction in general, it’s the details that swallow us whole,” he told a crowd of several thousand.

The Los Alamos laboratory had been spared deep cuts, but under Clinton’s proposed budget it faces about $40 million in budget cuts that officials say could force the layoff of about 100 people.

Clinton’s two-month old defense conversion program proposes to spend $19.6 billion over the next five years. The money would go to retrain workers displaced by military cutbacks, to allow early retirement of some military and civilian workers, for environmental cleanup and for grants to help military contractors find civilian applications for their work.

Critics have charged that the program underestimates the difficulty of converting defense businesses to civilian work. And they say that in any case the $19.6 billion will have only a limited effect in helping the 2.5 million workers who could lose their jobs in the next decade.

But Clinton asserted: “It is a good beginning.”

Pressed by slumping polls and unresolved questions about his Bosnian policy, Clinton has sought to rebuild support for his program by explaining its payoff for Americans, and particularly for the middle class.

The President hopes that strong public support will bring pressure on Congress to go along with his economic and health care plans.

Clinton’s appearance in Los Alamos was well tailored to his goal of using the news media to drum up support. To ensure that enthusiasm was high, the organizers bused in thousands of high school students; they passed out American flags just before the event began.

Located on a valley overlooked by the snowcapped Sangre de Cristo mountains, the event made a striking picture.

Clinton came close to a faux pas at one point in his remarks, calling Los Alamos “Los Angeles.”

A chorus of boos followed. But Clinton tried to make a graceful recovery:

“I’m going there tomorrow,” he explained to the crowd. “And if I say ‘Los Alamos’ there, will you cheer?”

As has become his habit, Clinton spent part of his day conducting interviews with TV news stations, in an effort to give his message wide and largely unchallenged access to local markets.

The President’s California visit is his second since the election to a state that his advisers say is key to his strategy for 1996.

California’s unemployment rate fell to 8.6% in April, from 9.4% in March. But the state’s rate still lags far behind the national rate of 7%.

Part of Clinton’s hope to help California was stymied when Senate Republicans blocked the $19-billion economic stimulus proposal that would have channeled more than $2 billion to the state.

After the TV town hall, Clinton was scheduled to appear at a reception for local politicians and supporters at the television station, then to attend a dinner at the home of Larry and Shelia Lawrence. The Lawrences own the Hotel Del Coronado and are Clinton supporters.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft’s recent testimony that President Bush had “made no direct order” authorizing any of the practices photographed at Abu Ghraib prison was calculated to cloak the president with deniability. But it raises the real question: What constitutes the kind of “torture” that, according to Ashcroft, “this administration opposes”? And what exactly are the information-gathering techniques that the Bush administration does approve of? We don’t know because it refuses to be specific, opting instead for the wink-and-nod approach — publicly condemning torture in a general sort of way while discreetly demanding results by whatever means it takes.

This approach would be far more difficult if explicit approval from the president were required for any extraordinary interrogation methods. Such a “torture warrant” approach would force the president to specify precisely what is allowed and what is not: sleep deprivation? hooding? stress positions? threats? attack dogs? sexual humiliation? a sterilized needle under the nail?

A codification of torture would be controversial, of course, but it would produce accountability of precisely the kind this administration wants to avoid. To date, only one other democracy has ever openly confronted this issue — Israel.

Before 1999, Israel tried to come to terms with the torture issue. Rather than denying it publicly and winking at it privately like many other countries (and many police forces even in the United States), Israeli officials sought to codify what was and was not permissible in order to wage the most effective battle against terrorism within the rule of law.

They set out rules allowing “moderate physical pressure” in specific cases — including such nonlethal tactics as sleep deprivation, tying up prisoners in painful positions with hoods over their heads, violent shaking and loud music. The argument was that such measures were justified in “ticking bomb” cases in which getting instant information out of a terrorist suspect about an imminent attack was essential.

Esther Wachsman, for example, whose son was kidnapped by militants, has said she knew Israeli agents tortured a captured Palestinian to force him to reveal the 19-year-old’s whereabouts and that she had no regrets about it. “Was this man going to reveal this kind of information if they served him tea and played some Mozart?” she asked.

For some years the rules were in place, even though opponents argued that torture of any kind was a black-and-white issue — always wrong, never allowable.

In the end, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a decision in 1999 prohibiting all forms of rough interrogation. In rendering this decision, the court described in detail what was prohibited: shaking, stress positions, hooding, playing “powerfully loud music” and other physical pressures. The court did leave open a tiny window in ticking-bomb cases. It suggested that if an interrogator honestly and reasonably believed that the only way to prevent an attack was to apply moderate physical pressure, he could try to persuade a court after the fact that his actions fell under the defense of “necessity.” Thus far, no such defense has been offered.

This decision stimulated an important debate inside and outside of Israel. It is unlikely that it ended all physical abuse, but even Israel’s most strident critics acknowledge that it has certainly been curtailed.

The Israeli high court thrust itself into the debate over interrogation methods. The U.S. Supreme Court, on the other hand, seems to be trying to stay away from micromanaging interrogation techniques. In a recent decision, a majority ruled that the 5th Amendment does not prohibit torture itself — only the use of self-incriminating statements produced by torture in criminal prosecutions. Nor does the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment” preclude torture of detainees, because it applies only to punishments imposed after conviction. That leaves only the vague “due process” clause, which is in disrepute among a majority of the justices.

We need an open and candid debate, as Israel had, about what forms of rough interrogation, if any, should be permissible against what kinds of detainees under what circumstances. Specificity is required. Broad generalizations like “this administration opposes torture” have not worked and will not work in the future. A proposed interrogation code would be a good starting point.

Sen. Alex Padilla blasted the Trump administration Saturday, calling it “petty and unserious” after Vice President JD Vance referred to him as “Jose” during a news conference in Los Angeles the previous day.

“He knows my name,” Padilla said in an appearance on MSNBC on Saturday morning.

Vance visited Los Angeles on Friday for less than five hours after several weeks of federal immigration raids in the city and surrounding areas, sparking protests and backlash from state and local officials.

Padilla was thrown into the heated nationwide immigration debate when he was dragged to the ground by federal law enforcement officers and briefly detained when he attempted to ask U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question during a news conference earlier this month.

Vance characterized the move by California’s first Latino senator as “political theater” in his remarks.

“I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question, but unfortunately I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn’t a theater, and that’s all it is,” Vance said.

Vance served alongside Padilla in the Senate and is now the president of the upper chamber of Congress. Vance’s press secretary, Taylor Van Kirk, told Politico that the vice president misspoke and “must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.”

Padilla, in his TV interview, said he broke no laws.

He suggested the misnaming was intentional — and a reflection of the administration’s skewed priorities.

“He’s the vice president of the United States.” Padilla said. “You think he’d take the the situation in Los Angeles more seriously.”

Padilla said Vance might instead have taken the opportunity to talk to families or employers affected by raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Other California Democrats rallied behind Padilla after the misnaming incident.

“Calling him ‘Jose Padilla’ is not an accident,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Friday post on the social media platform X.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass highlighted racial undertones in Vance’s comments.

“I guess he just looked like anybody to you, but he’s not just anybody to us,” she said during a press conference on Friday. “He is our senator.”

A man accused of brandishing a rifle at a “No Kings Day” rally in Utah — prompting an armed safety volunteer to open fire and accidentally kill a protester — has been released from jail while the investigation continues.

Salt Lake County Dist. Atty. Sim Gill’s office said Friday that it was unable to make a decision on charges against Arturo Gamboa, who had been jailed on suspicion of murder after the June 14 shooting.

Salt Lake City police had said Gamboa brought an assault-style rifle to the rally and was moving toward the crowd with the weapon raised when a safety volunteer for the event fired three shots, wounding Gamboa and killing a nearby demonstrator, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo.

Gamboa did not fire his rifle and it is unclear what he intended to do with it. His father, Albert Gamboa, told the Associated Press this week that his son was “an innocent guy” who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Utah is an open-carry state, meaning people who can legally own a firearm are generally allowed to carry it on a public street. The volunteer has not been publicly identified as investigators have worked to determine who was at fault.

Judge James Blanch said in the release order that Gamboa must live with his father and is forbidden from possessing firearms. The conditions terminate after two months or if criminal charges against him are pursued, Blanch wrote.

Gamboa’s attorney, Greg Skordas, did not immediately respond to a telephone message left for him seeking comment.

Police said the day after the shooting that witnesses reported seeing Gamboa lift the rifle when he was ordered to drop it and that instead he began running toward the crowd. He fled but was arrested nearby, accused of creating the dangerous situation that led to Ah Loo’s death.

Salt Lake City police said in a statement the next day that Gamboa “knowingly engaged in conduct … that ultimately caused the death of an innocent community member.”

But three days after Gamboa was booked into jail, with no formal charges filed, police acknowledged that the circumstances surrounding the shooting remained uncertain. They issued a public appeal for any video footage related to the shooting or Gamboa, and said detectives were still trying “to piece together exactly what happened.”

The volunteer who confronted Gamboa was described by event organizers as a military veteran whose role as a safety volunteer was to maintain order.

Experts say it’s extremely rare for such individuals, often called safety marshals, to be armed. They typically rely on calm demeanor, communication and relationships with police and protesters to help keep order, said Edward Maguire, an Arizona State University criminology and criminal justice professor.

Police said the permit for the protest did not specify that there would be armed security.

Protest organizers have not said whether or how the safety volunteer who shot Ah Loo was trained or explained why he was armed. All attendees, including those in safety roles, were asked not to bring weapons, according to Sarah Parker, a national coordinator for the 50501 Movement. Parker’s organization on Thursday said it was disassociating from a local chapter of the group that helped organize the Utah protest.

The demonstration involving some 18,000 people was otherwise peaceful. It was one of hundreds nationwide involving millions of demonstrators against President Trump’s policies — which they likened to the dictatorial actions of a monarch — and his military parade in Washington, which marked the Army’s 250th anniversary and coincided with Trump’s birthday.

Brown writes for the Associated Press.