More renderings of Trump’s planned White House East Wing ballroom submitted to fine arts panel ahead of meeting

(WASHINGTON) — As candidates and political parties gear up for the 2026 midterm election campaign, the Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider whether long-standing legal limits on coordinated spending — enacted to prevent corruption — violate the First Amendment.

The case was brought by Republican senatorial and congressional campaign committees along with then-Sen. JD Vance and former Rep. Steve Chabot, both Ohio Republicans, against the Federal Election Commission, which is tasked with enforcing the rules.

The coalition seeks to eliminate limits on the ability of parties, which often have a fundraising advantage over individual candidates, to more freely and directly finance TV ads and organizing efforts of candidates they favor. The practice is known as coordinated spending.

Oral arguments will take place before a Supreme Court that has been consistently skeptical of campaign finance regulations on free speech grounds, narrowing the scope of contribution limits and in 2014 famously rolling back caps on corporate campaign spending with the Citizens United decision.

The Trump administration, which controls the FEC, is declining to enforce or defend coordinated spending limits. In its place, the Democratic National Committee and a Supreme Court-appointed attorney will argue for why they should be preserved.

“This has been held constitutional at least twice before by the Supreme Court and more times by lower courts,” said Marc Elias, the Democratic attorney defending the law. “The entire campaign finance system is built upon these limits.”

Congress in 1974 set limits on the amount of money American individuals, organizations and political parties can give directly to candidates, and the Supreme Court has upheld them as permissible protections against bribery in the electoral process.

In 2025, the political contribution limits are $3,500 per person to an individual candidate and $44,300 per person to a national party committee per year, according to the FEC.

At issue in this case are added limits set by Congress on the amount of money a political party can spend in direct coordination with a candidate.

The FEC’s coordinated spending limits are computed based on each state’s voting-age population and the number of members of Congress. For Senate nominees, the cap is between $127,200 and $3.9 million in 2025; for House nominees, the limit is $63,300 in most states, according to the FEC.

Advocates say the spending limits prevent quid pro quo corruption between a candidate and party, and prevent individuals from attempting to circumvent contribution rules by essentially funneling donations to a candidate through the party, which is subject to the higher caps.

“If those contributions, which dwarf the base limits on [individual] contributions to candidates, are effectively placed at a candidate’s disposal through coordinated spending, they become potent sources of actual or apparent corruption,” argue attorneys for Public Citizen, a nonprofit voter advocacy group, in a brief to the high court.

More than a dozen states and independent election watchdog groups have also urged the court to leave campaign-finance rules to legislators, arguing they are better positioned to establish policies for elections than judges are.

The defenders of the limits also contend that the Republican plaintiffs lack legal standing to bring the case. They say that because the Trump FEC is not going to enforce the rules, there is no injury to the parties involved and that Vance and Chabot are not even active candidates for office who would be affected by the coordinated spending limits.

Republicans insist coordinated spending limits are unconstitutional suppression of free speech and that they are ineffective in the purported goal of curbing corruption.

“One of the key functions of a political party is to make sure that its candidates will vote for the party’s platform once in office,” the Republican committees tell the Supreme Court.

The case — National Republican Senatorial Committee, et al. v. Federal Election Commission — is expected to be decided by the end of June 2026 when the Supreme Court’s term concludes.

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(WASHINGTON) — House Republicans are set to take the next steps on Wednesday to hold former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with committee subpoenas related to the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.

On Wednesday, Oversight Chairman James Comer is set to hold a markup of two resolutions finding the Clintons in contempt of Congress after they defied a subpoena for a deposition with the committee last week.

“The Clintons are not above the law, and the House Oversight Committee will move to hold them in contempt of Congress,” Comer, a Republican, said in a statement last week. “If Democrats refuse to hold the Clintons accountable, they will expose themselves as hypocrites.”

The Clintons have insisted that the subpoena is without legal merit, fighting the subpoena for months.

Last summer, Republicans and Democrats on Oversight’s Federal Law Enforcement Subcommittee approved a motion to issue subpoenas to 10 individuals, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, for testimony related to their investigation into Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. 

Republicans have pointed at the former president’s travels on Epstein’s private aircraft in the early 2000s and the Clinton “family’s past relationship” with Epstein and Maxwell.

The contempt resolution is expected to advance out of the committee Wednesday afternoon — teeing up a full vote on the House floor days later. The timing of floor consideration won’t become clear until after the committee markup.

If Democrats oppose the floor vote, Speaker Mike Johnson can afford to lose just two Republican votes before a third GOP defector could upset passage.

The resolution, if passed, would direct the speaker of the House to refer the case to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia — under the Department of Justice — for possible criminal prosecution. A simple majority is needed to clear a contempt resolution, though it does not require passage in the Senate.

Besides defying the subpoena, neither Bill Clinton nor Hillary Clinton has been accused of wrongdoing and denies having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. No Epstein survivor or associate has ever made a public allegation of wrongdoing or inappropriate behavior by the former president or his wife in connection with his prior relationship with Epstein.

Last month, in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the Justice Department released several photographs of former President Clinton apparently taken during his international travels with Epstein and Maxwell between 2002 and 2003.

Following that disclosure, a spokesperson for the two-term Democratic president argued that the Trump administration released those images to shield the Trump White House “from what comes next, or from what they’ll try to hide forever.”

For months, David Kendall, the Clintons’ lawyer, has continuously argued that the Clintons have no information relevant to the committee’s investigation and should not be required to appear for in-person testimony.

Comer wrote in a letter to Kendall in October that the committee is “skeptical” that the Clintons have only limited information, and argued it was up to the committee, not the Clintons, to make determinations of the value of their testimony.

“[T]he Committee believes that it should be provided in a deposition setting, where the Committee can best assess its breadth and value,” Comer wrote.

Comer said in a statement on Tuesday that Bill Clinton’s lawyers made an offer for Comer, Ranking Member Robert Garcia and two members of each of their staffs to have a conversation with only former President Bill Clinton in New York. A Comer spokesperson said he “rejected the Clintons’ ridiculous offer.”

“The House Oversight Committee rejects the Clintons’ unreasonable demands and will move forward with contempt resolutions on Wednesday due to their continued defiance of lawful subpoenas,” Comer wrote in the statement.

In response to Comer’s statement, Clinton spokesperson Angel Ureña told ABC News that the Clintons “never said no to a transcript.”

“Interviews are on the record and under oath. Whether it was written or typed isn’t why this is happening. If that were the last or only issue, we’d be in a different position,” Ureña said in a statement.

“You keep misdirecting to protect you-know-who and God knows what,” she said, referring to Comer.

Last week, the ex-president’s office publicly released two written declarations — dated Jan. 13 from each of the Clintons — which it said were provided to the Oversight Committee. Both Clintons denied any personal knowledge of the criminal activities of Epstein and Maxwell. Both also denied ever visiting Epstein’s private estate in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“Once I left office, I devoted my time to the Clinton Foundation. As part of the work of the Foundation, I accepted offers from others to use private air travel for the philanthropic and life-saving humanitarian efforts,” former President Clinton wrote. “In the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein offered a plane that was large enough to accommodate me, my staff, and my U.S. Secret Service detail, in support of visiting the Foundation’s philanthropic work. As has been widely reported, I and my staff took trips on his plane from 2002-2003, visiting Foundation projects and attending conferences and meetings. I have never visited Little St. James Island, and I do not recall speaking to Mr. Epstein for more than a decade prior to his 2019 arrest.”

The former president acknowledges in his declaration that Epstein “may very well have attended” White House events during Clinton’s two terms in office and may have been among the “tens of thousands” of people photographed with him. But Clinton claimed he did “not recall encountering Mr. Epstein, or any specific interaction with him, while in office.”

Each of the Clintons contend that they had no involvement — while in office or afterward — in any criminal investigations or prosecutions of either Epstein or Maxwell.

“I did not direct, oversee or participate in the handling of the investigations or prosecutions of the Epstein or Maxwell cases,” both Clintons stated in their declarations.

Both Clintons also wrote that they could not recall the circumstances of how they met Maxwell — but remember that she later “began a personal relationship with a mutual friend.”

“To be clear, I had no idea of Mr. Epstein’s or Ms. Maxwell’s criminal activities,” former President Clinton wrote. “And, irrespective of any intent either may have ever had, I did not take any action for the purpose of helping them to avoid any type of scrutiny.”

“During my tenure in public office, from 1993 to 2013, I never had any responsibility for, or involvement with, the Department of Justice’s handling of the Epstein and Maxwell investigations or prosecutions,” Hillary Clinton wrote in her declaration.

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump announced conservative policymaker and former Fed governor Kevin Warsh as his pick to be the new Federal Reserve chairman.

In a post on Truth Social early Friday morning, Trump said that he has “known Kevin for a long period of time, and have no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best.”

“He will never let you down,” Trump continued.

Warsh previously served on the Fed’s board of governors from 2006 to 2011. He was a top adviser to then-Fed chairman Ben Bernanke during the 2008 financial crisis, serving as a liaison between the central bank and Wall Street. During that time, he was an inflation “hawk” — skeptical of the Fed’s ultra-low interest rate policy. But in more recent interviews, Warsh has heaped praise on Trump and called for “regime change” at the Fed, while also supporting lower interest rates.

On Thursday, Trump said that he had “chosen a very good person” while walking the carpet at the Kennedy Center ahead of the premiere of the documentary about first lady Melania Trump. 

Trump said his pick to replace current Chairman Jerome Powell is an “outstanding person and a person that won’t be too surprising to people.”

 “A lot of people think that this is somebody that could have been there a few years ago,” Trump went on. “It’s going to be somebody that is very respected, somebody that’s known to everybody in the financial world. And I think it’s going to be a very good choice.”

Trump has repeatedly attacked Powell over the past year for his cautious approach to lowering interest rates. 

Powell’s term as chairman expires in May. 

Earlier this month, in an extraordinary escalation of the months-long attack on the independence of the Federal Reserve, Powell announced that federal prosecutors had launched a criminal investigation related to a multi-year renovation of the Fed’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

Earlier this week, at its first meeting since news of the investigation surfaced, the Federal Reserve voted to hold interest rates steady. 

Trump said that the Fed governors who voted earlier this week to pause interest rates will change their minds once there is a new chair. 

“If they respect the Fed chairman, they’ll be with us all the way,” Trump said. “They want to see the country be great.”

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