New images appear to show entire White House East Wing demolished
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(WASHINGTON) — New images appear to show the entire White House East Wing has been demolished to make way for President Donald Trump’s $300 million ballroom.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the demolition as she faced questions from reporters at a briefing on Thursday.
President Trump initially said in July that the project would not interfere with the existing White House structure. Then this week, as crews began to raze the East Wing, the administration said the entire wing would need to be “modernized” to make way for the massive 90,000 square foot ballroom.
By Thursday, satellite images from Planet Labs PBC showed the East Wing reduced to rubble.
“This is the People’s House. Why not inform the public of that change and when it was decided that the East Wing would have to be demolished?” ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce asked Leavitt.
“With any construction project changes come. And we have informed all of you, we’ve been keeping you apprised of this project. We’ve shown you the renderings,” Leavitt said.
“The plans changed when the president heard counsel from the architects and the construction companies who said that in order for this East Wing to be modern and beautiful for many, many years to come, for it to be a truly strong and stable structure, this phase one that we’re now in was necessary,” Leavitt added.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump has determined that the United States is in now engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which the administration has deemed as unlawful combatants, according to a confidential memo obtained by ABC News Thursday.
It comes after recent U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean.
The notice was sent to several congressional committees and was first reported by The New York Times.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
US Capitol Building (Photo by Mike Kline (notkalvin)/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Mark Kelly will introduce legislation in the Senate on Tuesday that would strip out a provision in the just-passed government funding bill that allows senators to sue the government if their phone records are investigated without notifying them.
The bill comes after Senate Republicans included within the massive government funding bill that ended the 43-day government shutdown a provision that would allow senators whose phone records were subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to sue for $500,000 per accessed device.
News of the Senate’s inclusion of this provision caused bipartisan outrage in the House of Representatives.
House Speaker Mike Johnson last week said the House would hold a standalone vote on a provision to strip the language out of the funding bill this week. Due to the bipartisan objection to these provisions, the House bill has a high likelihood of being successfully passed out of the lower chamber.
“I think that was way out of line. I don’t think that was a smart thing … and the House is going to reverse — we are going to repeal that, and I’m going to expect our colleagues in the Senate to do the same thing,” Johnson said at a press conference last week.
Kelly and Heinrich’s bill is not identical to the House provision but the two bills closely resemble one another.
Efforts to repeal the phone record provision face a far more difficult path in the Senate than in the House.
The bill has 24 Democratic co-sponsors but currently no GOP supporters.
Sources told ABC News that Senate Majority Leader John Thune was personally responsible for including the language in the bill. Thune would be the one responsible for placing the bill on the floor, where it would need 60 votes to advance.
U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) speaks at a news conference in the U.S. Capitol on December 1, 2025, in Washington, DC. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote a letter to Secretary of the Navy John Phelan on Tuesday expressing concern about the Navy’s review of Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired U.S. Navy Captain who serves on the committee.
The letter, which was shared with ABC News, comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked Phelan to review Kelly for “potentially unlawful conduct” after the Arizona senator was featured in a video with five other Democrats who have served in the military and U.S. intelligence telling service members they could refuse illegal orders, according to a memo posted on social media by the Pentagon.
In the memo, Hegseth requests that he be briefed on the outcome of the review by no later than Dec. 10.
The Democrats on the committee, except for Kelly, condemned the review in the letter.
“We believe this ‘review’ along with the Department of Defense’s social media post announcing a ‘thorough review’ of Senator Kelly’s actions, ‘which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings’ is inappropriate, threaten the separation of powers established by our Founding Fathers, amount to a purely political exercise seeking to threaten legitimate and lawful actions by a duly elected Senator, and politicize our military justice system,” the senators wrote.
Kelly has criticized the Trump administration for threatening him with legal action. He has continued to post on social media slamming President Donald Trump and his officials over their policies.
“When Pete Hegseth tweeted he was investigating me, Gabby laughed and laughed,” Kelly said during an event last week, referring to his wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords. “She realized two things. One, that guy’s a joke, and two, I’m not backing down.”
In the letter, these Democratic senators wrote to Phelan that “the theory that a sitting Member of Congress should be subject to disciplinary action entirely unrelated to their service, particularly for simply restating the law as articulated in the UCMJ and the Manual for Courts-Martial, sets an incredibly dangerous precedent.”
The letter dismissed the review as a “baseless and patently political undertaking” and argued that it violates the separation of powers.
“Senator Kelly has been elected twice by the people of Arizona as their representative and voice in the Senate. The idea that the Department would try to undo or undermine the will of Arizona’s citizens is a direct affront to our democratic system of government,” the senators wrote.
The senators also challenged the idea that the review could be conducted impartially, citing social media posts from Trump and Hegseth that they say have made “fair proceedings impossible.”
Following the video’s posting in November, Trump wrote on social media that the video demonstrated “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump and the White House subsequently denied that he was threatening the lawmakers with execution.
The senators said that statements like this, coupled with a directive from Hegseth to Phelan that he brief Hegseth on the review by Dec. 10, “demonstrate an outright, brazen abuse of power intended to influence the military justice process and intimidate and silence a U.S. Senator for purely political purposes.”
Kelly responded to the call for a review during a press conference earlier this month.
“I will not be intimidated by this president. I am not going to be silenced by this president or the people around because I’ve given too much in service to this country to back down to this guy,” Kelly said at the time.
In their letter, the Democratic senators said that a review of Kelly raises “significant legal concerns” about Kelly’s constitutional protections under a number of statutes.
“The impartiality of our military and the military justice system to fairly uphold the Constitution and the law are paramount to our nation,” the senators wrote.
ABC News has reached out to Phelan for comment.
ABC News’ Ivan Pereira contributed to this report.
