Steny Hoyer arrives in Christianborg Palace on January 16, 2026 in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo by Martin Sylvest Andersen/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — At the beginning of this year, after spending more than four decades in Congress and serving as the number two Democrat in the House under Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Steny Hoyer, 87, announced his plans to retire at the end of his current term.
Hoyer’s announcement instantly launched a crowded race to replace him in southern Maryland’s deep-blue 5th Congressional District, which has ballooned to include more than 20 Democratic primary candidates. Voters head to the polls Tuesday to decide who will be the Democratic nominee for Hoyer’s seat, as well as other federal, state and local offices on the ballot in Maryland’s midterm primary election.
Shortly after announcing his retirement, Hoyer chose his intended successor — the longtime Democrat endorsed his former aide Maryland state Del. Adrian Boafo. The district is unlikely to elect a Republican, so whoever wins the Democratic primary is on a glide path to victory in November.
Boafo, who served as Hoyer’s campaign manager, also picked up endorsements from other Democratic heavyweights in the state like Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks.
Those running against Boafo include former Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker, healthcare CEO Quincy Bareebe, Prince George’s County Councilwoman Wala Blegay and former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who rose to national prominence for his testimony in congressional hearings about defending the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Dunn ran for the House in the 3rd District in 2024 and finished second in the Democratic primary.
The debate over the influence of pro-Israel and pro-cryptocurrency super PAC money has played a central role in the race to replace Hoyer, as Boafo’s opponents have criticized the millions of dollars his campaign has received from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s United Democracy Project (UDP) PAC and Protect Progress, a crypto-aligned super PAC.
“Adrian has spent the last year laser-focused on the issues impacting Marylanders. His opponents continue to try and make the race about anything else besides what this race is actually about: the people of this district and the real need to have a fighter who stands up to this President,” Boafo’s campaign manager, Oren Adams, told ABC News in a statement.
In the northwest part of the state, former Rep. David Trone — who gave up his seat representing Maryland’s 6th District to launch an unsuccessful run for Senate in 2024 — is trying to make a political comeback after losing to Alsobrooks in the 2024 Democratic primary. Trone, a businessman who has self-funded his campaigns to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, is hoping to reclaim his seat from his successor, Rep. April McClain-Delaney, the wife of former Rep. John Delaney, who also once represented the 6th District before leaving to seek higher office.
At the top of the ballot, Moore seeks the Democratic nomination for what would be his second term in the governor’s mansion. The high-profile governor is seeking re-election as his name continues to be floated as a potential contender for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028.
President Donald Trump stands during the national anthem at the start of the NTT INDYCAR Series, Aug. 23, 2026, in Washington. (Doug Mills/Pool via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump maintained his firm stance amid the ongoing U.S.-Canada trade war on Wednesday, repeating his claims that Canada is one of “the worst countries” in the world to deal with and that they have taken “advantage” of the U.S. during a radio interview with conservative host Glenn Beck.
“Look, I don’t know how you feel about Canada. They are one of the worst countries in the world to deal with,” Trump said, remarking on negotiating with the Canadians.
Negotiations between Canada and the U.S. broke down over the weekend and a fresh round of 50% U.S. tariffs on some Canadian goods took effect on Saturday, leading Canada to retaliate with a set of its own levies.
“They take advantage of us as though they were a state, and they’re not a state,” Trump added.
The president then mentioned the “good deal” with Canada last week, which fell apart just before the deadline.
“I had a deal that was a pretty good deal, you know, quite good, because they’re afraid that I won’t do any business. In other words, we won’t trade. They don’t have anything that we have to have. OK, we can get by,” Trump said. “I mean, there are a couple of things that would make it a little inconvenient, but we can get them elsewhere. And it’s time to teach Canada you can’t do this anymore.”
On Tuesday, Trump said in a call with CNN that Canada’s claim that the U.S. added more conditions to their agreement in the final hours of negotiations “sounds like” him, seeming to confirm the Canadian position. He later added, according to CNN, that he doesn’t “deny anything” when pressed on whether he denies the Canadians’ claims.
Those comments from Trump contradict what some in his own administration, including Vice President JD Vance, have said about the collapse of the talks. Vance has insisted that it was Canada who was at fault for the talks falling apart, pinning the blame on Canada during a campaign stop in Maine earlier this week, saying they were making “unreasonable last-minute demands.”
During his radio interview on Wednesday, the president also brought up his call this week to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” He added that maybe he “wasn’t” joking about it, pointing to the fact that he renamed the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America” last year.
“You saw the Lake Ontario — you know, people thought I was kidding. Maybe I wasn’t because the last one you saw was the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America,” Trump said.
An exterior view of the Department of Education building on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Education is expected to announce a major step in the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency — moving special education services and civil rights responsibilities to the departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Justice (DOJ), respectively, according to sources familiar.
The sources told ABC News the HHS is expected to receive the Offices of Special Education Programming (OSEP) and Rehabilitative Services Administration (RSA). The Justice Department will be responsible for the agency’s civil rights oversight. Transferring the offices will impact millions of students and families, including 7 million people who receive around $15 billion in grants through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the law creating free and appropriate education for children with disabilities.
President Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on closing the agency.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche on ABC’s “This Week.” (ABC News)
(WASHINGTON) — Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday addressed the Trump administration’s decision to ban three mainstream news outlets from accessing the White House, saying that President Donald Trump had not “denied access” to the organizations and asserting that it is a “privilege … not a right” to be at the White House.
“The president hasn’t denied access. That’s not the right way to describe it. This is — what the president has said is that he is sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news,” Blanche said in an exclusive interview with “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “There’s still obviously litigation going on, but the important thing, Martha, is to know that … being in the White House is a privilege. It’s not a right.”
In the early hours Thursday, Judge Timothy Kelly issued a temporary restraining order that required the White House to temporarily restore credentials of journalists working for CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Kelly said in his ruling that he believed the outlets cleared the “high bar” required to grant a TRO.
Journalists were allowed back onto the White House grounds later Thursday and primary television pool coverage resumed Friday for the final day of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s official state visit. But on Saturday, there was no TV pool coverage for the president’s trip to a football game in Tennessee; CNN was scheduled to be network covering the president that day, but they said their access to Air Force One was blocked.
Blanche said it wasn’t unusual for a news outlet to not be allowed onto the president’s plane.
“The White House routinely decides who can go on Air Force One. This wasn’t a a one-time denial of CNN. There’s all kinds of times when certain reporters are not flying or are flying,” according to Blanche, who added, “it’s not unusual, and as a matter of fact, it’s common every time the president travels that he and his team decide which reporters get to travel with the president.”
Blanche claimed the three news outlets that were subject to the White House ban “refuse to report anything accurately,” which he said presented a “national security problem.”
“When you have complete misinformation coming out of the White House that affects our relationship with our foreign partners, that affects our relationship with our foreign enemies — and so this is just not about the fact that they’re refusing to report accurate news. It’s all about the information that the American people have a right to hear coming out of of our what should be respected media outlets.”
Judge Kelly, however, was skeptical in his TRO ruling that national security was the true reason for the ban.
“For one thing, nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting,” Kelly wrote.
Hours after announcing the ban on social media, Trump was asked in the Oval Office if there was any “particular reason or particular story” that prompted it.
“No, no. It’s — it’s really just cumulative stories over the last two years. You get sick of it,” the president said.
On “This Week,” Blanche said he wouldn’t “get into what the judge says” because the litigation is ongoing, but added “our position has been clear from the beginning. What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security.”
When Raddatz pressed Blanche to provide specific examples of stories with which the White House has taken issue, Blanche declined to do so.
Artificial intelligence ‘vital to our national security’
On the issue of artificial intelligence, the attorney general echoed the president’s position on the technology, describing it as “so important and vital to our national security interests and to the success of this country that the United States lead in this space.”
Trump has said it’s critical that the U.S. continues to dominate the AI space, citing competition with China specifically.
“Whoever wins AI, WINS! We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I’m going to keep it that way! I’m not going to stifle Growth, of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, or the Internet, itself,” he posted on social media Monday.
Some AI company leaders are calling for an industry-wide slowdown amid growing concerns about how the rapid pace of development. Multiple incidents of AI agents acting autonomously have come to light in recent months, including instances where AI agents infiltrated outside companies without the agents’ parent companies’ awareness as it happened.
Last week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that OpenAI agent “infiltrated” a government public health website earlier this summer. This weekend, OpenAI confirmed that its models interacted with U.S. government websites in unexpected ways, behavior the company discovered amid an ongoing review into its AI agents’ behaviors.
Blanche acknowledged that “there’s going to be adjustments that have to be made” around AI as the industry continues to develop, but he argued the companies themselves already have the ability to “adjust the technology” as needed.
“In the meantime, the answer is not to just try to all of a sudden try to regulate this in a way that will make us second or third place in the world as far as being being the leaders in this space,” Blanche said.
During his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York Tuesday, Trump said of AI, “We’re going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice.”
Asked what that meant, Blanche said, “What it means is that we have a ton of laws — criminal laws, civil laws — that are already in place and on the books that allow us to charge individuals, to charge companies in the right circumstances when there’s crimes committed, and so the answer isn’t always more laws, more laws, more laws.”
“When there are crimes committed, we have a lot of tools already, and the federal Title 18 gives us a lot of a lot of ways to go after criminals and bad actors in the AI space and other spaces,” Blanche continued. “So when the president talks about about the fact that the Department of Justice and the FBI and [Homeland Security Investigations], they can go and arrest bad actors in this space, that’s what he means, and it’s true, and that’s what we’re doing.”
