Trump Administration Live Updates: Zelensky Turns to Europe as Russia Awaits U.S. Envoy’s Pitch
Where Things Stand
Ukraine war: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was meeting on Monday with President Emmanuel Macron of France, seeking support from European allies as the White House presses Ukraine to agree to a peace plan with Russia. After U.S.-Ukrainian talks on Sunday, Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for President Trump, was expected to travel to Moscow, where the Kremlin said he would meet with President Vladimir V. Putin on Tuesday. Read more ›
Prosecutor appeal: Alina Habba, a one-time member of Mr. Trump’s personal legal team, has been serving unlawfully as the top federal prosecutors in New Jersey, an appeals court said on Monday. Ms. Habba is one of a number of U.S. attorneys whom the Trump administration has kept in power even though she was neither confirmed by the Senate nor appointed by district court judges. Read more ›
M.R.I. scan: Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday evening that he would release the results of a recent magnetic resonance imaging scan. “If they want to release it, it’s OK with me to release it, it’s perfect,” he said. Asked what part of his body was scanned, he replied: “I have no idea.”
Speaker Mike Johnson just put President Trump on speakerphone at an event for Matt Van Epps, the Republican candidate for a special election in Tennessee on Tuesday. There was already a notable show of conservative support for Van Epps, but Trump’s call underscored how unexpectedly close this race in ruby red Tennessee has become.
The margin “has got to show that the Republican Party is stronger than it has ever been,” Trump told the group of elected officials, donors and Republican voters gathered in a Franklin barn filled with vintage cars and patriotic decor.
A federal appeals court said on Monday that Alina Habba had been serving unlawfully as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, dealing a blow to the Trump administration and most likely setting up a showdown at the Supreme Court.
In its ruling, the three-judge panel, based in Philadelphia, affirmed an earlier ruling by a Federal District Court judge, shooting down each of the government’s arguments for why Ms. Habba could continue to serve.
In their opinion, the judges wrote that the Trump administration appeared to have become frustrated by the legal and political barriers that have prevented its preferred U.S. attorneys from leading federal prosecutors’ offices. They added that the maneuvers undertaken to keep Ms. Habba in charge exemplified the difficulties it had faced.
“Yet the citizens of New Jersey and the loyal employees in the U.S. attorney’s office deserve some clarity and stability,” the judges wrote.
Ms. Habba is one of a number of U.S. attorneys whom the Trump administration has kept in power even though she was neither confirmed by the Senate nor appointed by district trial court judges — the two traditional pathways.
The challenge to Ms. Habba’s authority may be the first to reach the Supreme Court, though a similar case involving the U.S. attorney in Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, may be expedited by virtue of being entangled with criminal cases against President Trump’s enemies.
Last week, a federal judge found that Ms. Halligan, too, had been unlawfully appointed by the Trump administration, but the Justice Department has vowed to appeal.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Habba, 41, had represented Mr. Trump in several civil cases and played a public role in his 2024 presidential campaign. But she had no experience in criminal law before the president named her in March to a 120-day interim term as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor. Mr. Trump nominated her to take on the role permanently, but her appointment was doomed by opposition from the state’s two Democratic senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim.
In July, judges in the District of New Jersey declined to extend Ms. Habba’s term and instead tapped a veteran prosecutor, Desiree L. Grace, to lead the office. That led Attorney General Pam Bondi to disparage the judges, fire Ms. Grace and elevate Ms. Habba to the role of acting U.S. attorney through a complicated series of maneuvers that were at the heart of the appeal.
The decision on Monday affirms a ruling by Matthew W. Brann, the chief judge for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, who concluded in August that Ms. Habba had been serving as New Jersey’s U.S. attorney without legal authority since July 1.
The state’s federal courts have since been operating in limbo. The confusion has now extended for nearly four months and has slowed certain types of criminal cases and halted some grand jury proceedings.
Lawyers with the Department of Justice, which had appealed Judge Brann’s decision to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, had argued that the president’s power was broad and gave the executive branch “substantial authority to decide who is executing the criminal laws of the United States.”
Lawyers for Cesar Humberto Pina, a defendant indicted in New Jersey on fraud charges on July 10, had countered that Ms. Habba’s installation as the state’s top prosecutor violated a law known as the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.
The lawyers, Abbe D. Lowell and Gerald Krovatin, said in court papers that Mr. Trump had “pursued a shell game to keep her in power.”
“Relying on a chimera of at least seven different statutes, the government has, at various times, described Ms. Habba as ‘interim U.S. attorney,’ ‘acting U.S. attorney,’ ‘first assistant U.S. attorney’ and ‘special attorney,’” they wrote. “But she does not have the authority to lead the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of New Jersey under any of those titles.”
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
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Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine met in Paris on Monday with President Emmanuel Macron of France, seeking support from European allies while the Trump administration pushes to end the war with Russia.
The White House has been heaping pressure on Ukraine to agree to a peace plan even as Russia has signaled initial resistance to it. Despite a recent flurry of renewed diplomatic efforts, there has been little indication that gaps between the sides have narrowed.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials met over the weekend in Florida to hammer out the details of a peace proposal. Both sides called the talks constructive but said there was more work to be done, without specifying what key issues remain unresolved.
The meeting in Paris was expected to be the first of many in the coming days, with Mr. Zelensky saying he expected to be in touch with several European allies about “some tough issues that still have to be worked through.”
The Ukrainian president said that the focus of his discussion with Mr. Macron was “on negotiations to end the war and on security guarantees.”
“Much now depends on the involvement of every leader,” he said on social media. Not long after, he said he had spoken with Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, and had an “important briefing” with Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for President Trump.
Mr. Witkoff helped lead the U.S. delegation in Florida and was expected to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow on Tuesday.
He was involved in drafting an initial plan to end the war, which drew outrage from Ukraine and its European allies for echoing Russia’s maximalist demands since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine sought to soften parts of the proposal, leading to talks with U.S. officials in Geneva a week ago that resulted in a slimmed-down version of the plan.
The two sides set aside some of the more contentious issues for future negotiations, including limits on the size of the Ukrainian military, a proposed ban on basing NATO troops inside Ukraine, and where new boundaries between Russia and Ukraine would be drawn.
It was not immediately clear if any progress was made on those specific points during the talks in Florida.
Ahead of those meetings, Kyiv’s negotiators had identified a number of issues that could only be resolved at the leadership level, according to a foreign policy adviser to the Ukrainian government. In particular, they highlighted Russia’s demand for Ukrainian neutrality after the war, control of the eastern Donbas region and what security guarantees Europe and the United States could put in place to safeguard against a repeat Russian invasion.
Rustem Umerov, who led Ukraine’s delegation in Florida, said the “substantive” discussions there had been “difficult but productive.”
“We have achieved tangible progress on the path toward a just peace,” he said on social media on Sunday, without providing details. “There is still much work ahead,” he added.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top foreign policy official, told reporters this “could be a pivotal week for diplomacy.”
“It is clear that Russia does not want peace, and therefore we need to make Ukraine as strong as possible in order for them to be ready to stand up for themselves in this very, very difficult time,” she said ahead of a meeting of European Union defense ministers in Brussels.
After his talks in Paris, Mr. Zelensky was set to travel to Ireland for meetings on Tuesday.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who led the U.S. team alongside Mr. Witkoff, has acknowledged there was still work to be done and that any agreement reached with Ukraine would ultimately require buy-in from Russia.
Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday that Russia “would like to see” the war end and that “there’s a good chance we can make a deal.”
But Mr. Putin has seemed disinclined to make any concessions to Ukraine to end a war in which his troops have been advancing on the battlefield and bombarding Ukrainian cities. He has also defended Mr. Witkoff against accusations of pro-Kremlin bias.
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, Ivan Nechepurenko from St. Petersburg, Russia, and Jeanna Smialek from Brussels.
Reporting from Washington
A top Republican and Democrats in Congress suggested on Sunday that American military officials might have committed a war crime in President Trump’s offensive against boats in the Caribbean after a news report said that during one such attack, a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors.
The remarks came in response to a Washington Post report on Friday that said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a verbal order to kill everyone aboard boats suspected of smuggling drugs, and that this led a military commander to carry out a second strike to kill those who had initially survived an attack in early September.
“Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” Representative Mike Turner, Republican of Ohio and a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.
Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said on CBS that if the report was accurate, the attack “rises to the level of a war crime.” And on CNN, when asked if he believed a second strike to kill survivors constituted a war crime, Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, answered, “It seems to.”
The lawmakers’ comments came after top Republicans and Democrats on the two congressional committees overseeing the Pentagon vowed over the weekend to increase their scrutiny of U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean after the report. Mr. Turner said the article had only sharpened lawmakers’ already grave questions about the operation.
“There are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drug boats down in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the legal justification that’s been provided,” he said. “But this is completely outside of anything that’s been discussed with Congress, and there is an ongoing investigation.”
The investigations by both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are the sharpest scrutiny to date by Congress of Mr. Trump’s escalating military offensive, undertaken without congressional approval or consultation, which he says is aimed at taking out drug traffickers.
They constitute a notable step by Republican lawmakers who have spent much of the year deferring to Mr. Trump and refraining from exercising oversight of his actions.
Senators Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committee’s top Democrat, said on Friday night that they had “directed inquiries” to the Defense Department.
“We will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances,” they wrote.
The House Armed Services Committee followed suit on Saturday. In a joint statement, Representatives Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama and the panel’s chairman, and Adam Smith of Washington, the senior Democrat, said that they were “committed to providing rigorous oversight” of the boat strikes and that they were “taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.”
The United States has built up a military presence in the Caribbean meant to put pressure on Venezuela. Trump administration officials have said that they are trying to deter drug smuggling, and that the boat strikes, which have killed more than 80 people since early September, are part of a purported formal armed conflict with drug cartels. But members of Congress have been voicing concerns over the legal justification being used to conduct them.
The Washington Post reported this week that in the first boat attack, on Sept. 2, there had been survivors in the water after the first missile strike and the military carried out a second one to kill them because of Mr. Hegseth’s orders. The Intercept also reported in September that the military had carried out a follow-up strike to kill the survivors of an initial strike.
In a statement on Friday, Mr. Hegseth denounced The Post’s report. He defended the military’s actions and said officials had been clear in all the operations that the boat strikes were designed to be “lethal, kinetic strikes.”
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Mr. Trump expressed confidence in Mr. Hegseth. The president suggested that he “wouldn’t have wanted” a second strike that killed survivors, before reiterating that he believed Mr. Hegseth had denied that account of the attack. The defense secretary did not directly contradict The Post’s reporting in his Friday statement but called it “fabricated and inflammatory.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, called for Mr. Hegseth to release “the full, unedited tapes of the strikes so the American people can see for themselves.”
Democrats have repeatedly criticized the boat strikes as illegal, likening them to extrajudicial killings. Mr. Kelly was part of a group of six lawmakers who made a video this month that reminded troops they were obligated to refuse illegal orders, though it did not mention any specific order.
On Sunday, Mr. Kelly, who is being investigated by the Pentagon for his remarks in the video, said he had “serious concerns about anybody in that chain of command stepping over a line that they should never step over.” He also suggested that lawmakers would put officials “under oath” in their scrutiny of the boat strikes.
Mr. Turner’s comments and the moves by Mr. Wicker and Mr. Rogers suggested that Republicans, too, were increasingly concerned about the scope and legality of the operations.
The committees’ promise for stronger oversight also comes as a small number of hard-right Republicans, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have voiced dismay over foreign policy entanglements that they say are at odds with Mr. Trump’s promised “America First” approach.
Still, many Republicans have expressed support for the military operations in Venezuela. On Sunday, Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, a close Trump ally, dismissed The Post’s report and defended the administration.
Mr. Mullin, who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Trump was “protecting the United States by being very proactive.”
Julian E. Barnes and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
Secretary of State Marco Rubio emerged from talks with Ukrainian officials in Florida on Sunday to say that there was still “much work to do” on a proposal to end the war with Russia.
Missing from the Ukrainian group was Andriy Yermak, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s right-hand man and chief of staff who resigned on Friday amid a corruption investigation. Mr. Yermak had served as lead negotiator in recent talks with American officials.
Neither Mr. Rubio nor Rustem Umerov, who led the Ukrainian delegation after Mr. Yermak’s resignation, revealed details of the discussions, although both described the talks as productive. Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for President Trump, plans to travel to Moscow on Monday to meet President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, according to a U.S. official.
Mr. Zelensky said on Sunday evening that he had received a preliminary report from the delegation in Florida. “It is important that the talks have a constructive dynamic and that all issues were discussed openly and with a clear focus on ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty and national interests,” he wrote on X, thanking the Trump administration “for the time that is being invested so intensively.”
Ukrainian officials have insisted that the dynamics of the discussions would not fundamentally change, even though Mr. Yermak had played a central role and was replaced in Florida by Mr. Umerov, the head of the National Security and Defense Council.
Last week, Mr. Yermak negotiated to soften a draft proposal to end the war from the Trump administration, whose 28 points largely reflected Russian demands. These included withdrawing from territory in eastern Ukraine, forgoing NATO membership and ruling out a postwar Western peacekeeping force for Ukraine.
The proposal included a promise of security guarantees to prevent another Russian invasion that would be enforced in part by the United States, but without detailing the level of commitment to Ukraine’s defense.
With Ukraine facing pressure on the battlefield and from the White House, the continued involvement of Mr. Yermak — whose home was raided by investigators on Friday — was seen by some Ukrainians as a potential distraction in negotiations.
His departure helped ease worries in Ukraine that Russia or the United States might use the $100 million embezzlement scandal as leverage to push Kyiv to make painful concessions in talks.
Shawn McCreesh and Edward Wong contributed reporting.
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