Talk of the Town
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Defense on Monday said it is launching a “thorough review” into Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, citing “serious allegations of misconduct.”
The announcement comes days after President Donald Trump accused Kelly and other Democratic lawmakers of “seditious behavior” for a video in which they said that U.S. service members could refuse illegal orders.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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(NEW YORK) — New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will have one familiar face in his administration when he takes office in January.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced Wednesday that she accepted Mamdani’s offer to remain in her position when Mamdani succeeds Mayor Eric Adams.
Late into his mayoral campaign, Mamdani, 34, said he would not replace the commissioner if elected. The mayor-elect cited the city’s drop in shootings, murders and transit crime since Tisch, 44, began her tenure as the commissioner in November 2024.
“I’ve spoken to Mayor-elect Mamdani several times, and I’m ready to serve with honor as his Police Commissioner. That’s because he and I share many of the same public safety goals for New York City: lowering crime, making communities safer, rooting out corruption, and giving our officers the tools, support, and resources they need to carry out their noble work,” Tisch said in a statement.
“I have admired her work cracking down on corruption in the upper echelons of the police department, driving down crime in New York City, and standing up for New Yorkers in the face of authoritarianism,” Mamdani said in a statement.
Mamdani has been previously outspoken about his concerns about the NYPD and has apologized for some of his past comments that were critical of the force.
Tisch acknowledged that she and Mamdani do have some differences in a department-wide email on Wednesday morning.
“Now, do the Mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t. But in speaking with him, it’s clear that we share broad and crucial priorities: the importance of public safety, the need to continue driving down crime, and the need to maintain stability and order across the department. We also agree that you deserve the city’s respect and support,” she said in the email that was obtained by ABC News.
“I appreciate that the Mayor-elect wants a team with different points of view — a team where ideas and policies are debated on their merits. In those discussions, you can trust that I will be a fierce advocate for you and for this department. You know how I operate: I don’t mince words. When I say something, I mean it. And that is not going to change,” Tisch added.
Tisch, who is the daughter of James Tisch, the CEO of the Loews Corporation, has long been involved in city government under different administrations.
In 2008, she was an intelligence research specialist in the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau, later counsel to the police commissioner, and the Counterterrorism Bureau’s director of policy and planning.
When Bill Bratton returned to lead the NYPD under Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014, Tisch was appointed as the deputy commissioner of Information Technology and led efforts to improve the department’s tech, including its CompStat tracking.
When Mayor Eric Adams took office in 2022, he appointed her as sanitation commissioner.
When Police Commissioner Edward Caban resigned in September 2024, following a federal probe and an FBI search of his home, Adams, who was indicted on federal charges that same month, appointed Thomas Donlon as an interim commissioner before announcing Tisch two months later.
She became the second female NYPD commissioner, following Keechant Sewell, who served from January 2022 to June 2024.
Adams, who decided not to run for re-election in October, praised Tisch’s work and her decision to stay on.
“In choosing her to stay on as police commissioner, Mayor-elect Mamdani is recognizing our public-safety efforts were right and that they will continue into the future. We all want a safer city, and keeping Commissioner Tisch in place and supporting our police officers every day with the policies we have implemented, is exactly how we do that,” he said in a statement Wednesday.
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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump says he’d consider declaring an “insurrection” inside the United States, accusing Democratic governors and mayors of preventing the federal government from enforcing immigration laws and turning their cities in “war zones.”
“Chicago’s a great city where there’s a lot of crime,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “And if the governor can’t do the job, we’ll do the job. It’s all very simple.”
Invoking the Insurrection Act would unfurl extraordinary presidential powers to use military force in American cities in a manner not used since the Civil Rights Movement.
It also would potentially pit troops from a southern Republican-run state against northern Democratic-run cities and states.
Some 200 National Guard troops from Texas were preparing to deploy to Chicago this week, administration officials told a federal judge this week who agreed not to block the deployments for now.
“That escalates the situation quite a bit,” Katherine Kuzminski, director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, said of the deployment of Texas troops to Chicago.
“It creates a tinderbox,” she said.
Under the law, the president can use military troops to protect federal buildings and federal employees. But they can only conduct domestic law enforcement if they remain under control of the state’s governors.
A major exception to those constraints is the Insurrection Act, which Trump said he’d be open to invoking if people were getting killed and if Democrats running states like Illinois and Oregon “were holding us up.”
Signed into law in 1807 by President Thomas Jefferson, that law allows the president to deploy military troops inside the U.S. to act as law enforcement and quell an “insurrection” that threatens a state or its residents.
“If I had to enact it, I do,” Trump said. “If people were being killed, and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I’d do that.”
In an interview on Newsmax, Trump said he wouldn’t invoke the law if he didn’t have to. At the same time, he told the outlet what is happening is “pure insurrection.”
Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has called allegations of civil unrest in his state “complete bs” and pushed back on the arrival of Texan troops as an “unconstitutional invasion of Illinois by the federal government.”
If Trump declares an insurrection in Illinois, it would mark the first time a president has invoked the law without a governor’s consent since Lyndon Johnson did so to protect civil rights activists in 1965 in Alabama.
Since then, the law has been invoked at a governor’s behest, including in 1992 during riots in California following the acquittal of police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King.
On Monday, both Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott and senior Trump aide Stephen Miller echoed Trump’s accusations that Chicago was a “war zone” and blamed Democratic politicians as refusing to enforce federal laws.
“We have local states refusing to enforce the law, and we have chaos,” Abbott said in an interview on Fox News with host Sean Hannity.
Miller, who has led Trump’s push for mass deportations inside the United States, directly accused local officials of trying to undermine the federal government.
“There is an effort to delegitimize the core function of the federal government of enforcing our immigration laws and our sovereignty,” he said in an interview on CNN on Monday.
“It is domestic terrorism. It is insurrection,” Miller added.
Kuzminski with the Center for a New American Security said the president has broad authority to invoke the Insurrection Act. But after Democratic-led states inevitably sue in court, a judge would likely press Trump to provide evidence that an insurrection has occurred.
In the case of Illinois, it’s possible the Trump administration would point to the “rebellion” as coming from Pritzker and other Democratic politicians themselves.
Pritzker said at a news conference on Monday that he believes invoking the Insurrection Act is part of Trump’s plan.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook — cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at night,” Pritzker told reporters.
“Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city,” he added.
Kuzminski said there’s a reason why a federal government should move cautiously when thinking about unleashing military might in American cities.
“We are proud of the fact that we train the world’s most lethal fighting force,” Kuzminski said. “And that’s why we have such firm boundaries on their use in law enforcement.”
ABC News’ Katherine Faulders and Peter Charalambous contributed to this report.
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(WASHINGTON) — As the negative impacts of the 33-day government shutdown compound, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said Sunday he doesn’t see the present funding impasse in terms of politics, insisting what Democrats are “focused on is the American people.”
Asked by ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz what Democrats have gained since the shutdown began, Kaine said, “Well, I don’t look at this as politics.”
“I mean, the president told the House, do a budget and, in his words, don’t deal with Democrats. So, Senate Democrats put an alternative on the table 12 days before Sept. 30 that fixed the health care wreckage that the Republicans caused and that ensured that a deal would be honored, both by Congress and the White House. The president refused to meet until the day before the deadline,” Kaine continued. “The guy’s unserious.”
Raddatz followed up to press Kaine: “Not talking about politics. What have Democrats gained during this period? And how long can this last?”
“I’m a United States senator,” Kaine said. “And I — yes, I run as a Democrat, and I’m a Democrat, but I just don’t approach my work that way. So, when you ask what Democrats have gained, what we’re — what we’re focused on is the American people. We want President Trump to stop firing people, canceling economic development projects. We want them to stop raising everybody’s costs.”
Kaine said Democrats want Trump to “simply sit down” and negotiate a “budget deal that puts us on a path to a health care fix.”
As the shutdown drags on, neither side has moved much from their initial stances. The Democrats continue to insist on health care priorities, including an extension of expiring tax credits for millions of Americans who get health insurance via the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans and White House continue to insist the only viable option is to pass the short-term funding bill that would fund the government through Nov. 21 and has failed to pass 13 times in the Senate.
‘We will delay, we will cancel’ flights to make sure people are safe: Duffy on ATC issues
Americans are now learning just how much their health care premiums would increase next year if these tax credits aren’t extended. But the consequences of the shutdown are also becoming more apparent: air traffic controllers are increasingly calling out sick leading to delays and ground stops, and the critical SNAP food assistance program is now in limbo after a judge ruled the administration must continue to fund the program, despite the administration claiming it legally cannot.
Here are more highlights from Kaine’s interview:
Kaine refutes GOP claims that Democrats are trying to give health care to “illegal immigrants”
Raddatz: I know you heard Secretary [Sean] Duffy [who appeared earlier on the show] talking about the onus is on the Democrats and that you are fighting to get illegal health care for immigrants.
Kaine: That’s a lie. The health care battle is not about health care for illegal immigrants and Sean Duffy knows it. It’s about millions of Americans who, in the last few weeks, have gotten premium increase notices that tell them that Donald Trump’s big, beautiful bill is delivering them big, ugly health insurance bills within the next few weeks unless we can find a fix.
On reports bipartisan rank and file senators are meeting to try to end shutdown
Raddatz: There are reportedly conversations among rank and file senators to try to reach — to negotiate the reopening of the government for a few weeks. Is that going on right now? Are you part of those discussions?
Kaine: I would say, Martha, I’m sort of at the edge of them. There is a group of people talking about these two issues, a path to fix the health care debacle and a guarantee that if we reopen government, I’m calling it a moratorium on mischief. If we agree to reopen, President Trump’s got to stop the firings.
The FAA, we’re talking air traffic control, they’ve forced 2,400 people out of the FAA during Trump’s first year when they were already short 3,000 air traffic controllers. Stop the firings, stop the game-playing, stop going after blue cities and helping red cities. Let’s have a moratorium on mischief during whatever this period is. Get on a path to fix people’s health care. If the president engages, we will be — we will find a deal I think within hours.
On Virginia Democrats’ chances in Tuesday’s governor election
Kaine: I feel really good about it, Martha. And here’s why. In Virginia, we are the best red to blue turnaround in the country in the last 25 years. And the way we’ve done it is by focusing on the economy. Abigail Spanberger, our candidate, three pillars to her campaign: affordability, jobs, and education, which is about kids, but also about our workforce. Her opponent is running ads on offbeat cultural issues that don’t really matter to most people. In Virginia, Democrats focus on the economy, winning the economic arguments, delivering economic results. And that’s why the state has moved from red to blue so dramatically since 2000.
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