It seems unlikely that President-elect Donald Trump’s various Cabinet picks will be confirmed via recess appointments or without FBI background checks.

Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun invested $30 million in President-elect Donald Trump’s crypto project three weeks after the election, helping Trump make a potentially hefty profit.

Sun, who recently made headlines for buying, then eating, a $6 million banana art piece, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission on charges of fraud, market manipulation and other alleged violations. He announced the investment in Trump’s project Nov. 25 on X.

Next week, Cassidy Hutchinson will turn 28. The New Jersey native graduated from Christopher Newport University in Virginia five years ago. She interned briefly on Capitol Hill before taking a job at the White House, earning a write-up in the college newspaper. She worked in the Trump administration for a little over two years.

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team announced Tuesday that it has signed an agreement with the Justice Department that allows the FBI to conduct background checks and other Justice officials to do security clearance vetting of the teams it plans to send into federal agencies for briefings, as well as people Trump intends to nominate to serve in his administration.

Chad Chronister, the Florida sheriff tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Tuesday he would not seek the post.

Chronister, a career law enforcement officer who has spent little time on the national stage, announced his withdrawal from consideration on social media, saying he planned to continue serving as the sheriff in Hillsborough County.

Most of what we know about Usha Vance we know because her husband told us. She first appears 209 pages into JD Vance’s 2016 memoir as “some sort of genetic anomaly,” a blend of beauty and brilliance that reminded him of a heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, minus the requisite bad personality. JD writes of Usha’s acerbic candor, her stinginess with compliments, how she became his “spirit guide” through the prim rituals of Yale Law School, a place that was utterly alien to a boy from Middletown, Ohio. In the memoir’s penultimate chapter, after unspooling his family’s pain and addiction, JD describes being amazed by the placid, loving nature of Usha’s family in San Diego. In a 2017 interview with NBC News, JD spoke of Usha’s fierce defense of loved ones. When a family dog got in trouble at day care, her response was, according to JD: “He’s too good for that day care.” As he accepted the Republican nomination for vice president in July, JD referred to Usha by name only once, calling her “an incredible lawyer and a better mom.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) on Tuesday warned that President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to select Kash Patel to lead the FBI marks “a red alert moment.”

In a video posted on social media, Murphy called Patel, a staunch defender of the president-elect who has vowed to fire the agency’s leadership and suggested seeking retribution against Trump’s perceived enemies, a “political sycophant.”

Republican senators will take a closer look this week at Donald Trump’s unconventional pick to run the Department of Defense, setting up another potential test of how much deference Republican senators are willing to show the president-elect.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) had no comment on President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter Biden, who was convicted on gun and tax charges.

“I got nothing for you on that,” Schumer said after reporters pressed him on the issue Tuesday.

Other Senate Democrats have criticized Biden’s decision.

“Wrong is wrong,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) Monday evening when asked about the pardon. “No one is above the law, and that includes presidents, former presidents and family members of presidents.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota), who plans to meet with President-elect Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth soon, said Tuesday that he will need assurances about the former Fox News host’s alcohol use.

“We absolutely cannot have a secretary of defense that gets drunk on a regular basis,” he said. “I got to know that he’s got that problem licked. That it’s not a problem anymore. I’ve seen public statements to that effect, and if he reassures me that’s the case, then I’m satisfied with it.”

Democratic Rep. Andy Kim will be sworn in as the next senator from New Jersey on Monday, his office said Tuesday.

Sen. George Helmy (D-New Jersey), who had stepped in to fill the remainder of Bob Menendez’s Senate term, will resign from office Sunday. Menendez, a Democrat, resigned in August after being convicted in a political corruption case, and Helmy took office in September.

Pam Bondi, whom President-elect Donald Trump announced would be his pick for attorney general, wrote Tuesday on X that she had met with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), calling him an “old friend and colleague.”

Hawley is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which considers nominations before the full chamber takes them up.

Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) is no longer a member of Congress or President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general. But House Democrats are still forcing the debate on whether to make public a report investigating him by the House Ethics Committee.

Rep. Matt Gaetz’s recent withdrawal as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general represented a significant early setback for Trump’s nascent effort to wreck shop in American government — and possibly seek his promised retribution against his political foes and the “enemy within.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) on Tuesday voiced his support of Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary, calling the embattled pick “just the change agent America needs to clean up the [Department of Defense]” and urging his colleagues to support him.

President-elect Donald Trump offered billionaire investor Stephen Feinberg the job of deputy defense secretary, said people familiar with the matter, a decision that could elevate a longtime political supporter with investments in defense companies that maintain lucrative Pentagon contracts.

A spokesman for Feinberg declined to say if the private equity investor has accepted the potential nomination.

President-elect Donald Trump has named more than two dozen people for top positions in his administration. His recent picks include Chad Chronister, a Florida sheriff, to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration and Kash Patel, a staunch loyalist and former Justice Department prosecutor, to replace FBI Director Christopher A. Wray.

See all the people Trump has named to his incoming administration and or the top contenders for unfilled roles in our tracker based on Washington Post reporting.

Given that the report first appeared on Fox News, we should take the anecdote about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s meeting with President-elect Donald Trump with a grain of salt.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) was reelected Tuesday as the top Democrat in the Senate for the next Congress, in which the party will serve as the minority.

The vote for Schumer and other Democratic Senate leaders was unanimous, according to a person familiar with the results, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose them before they were officially announced.

President-elect Donald Trump called into a closed-door gathering of Republican senators on Tuesday morning to discuss how to pass his top policy priorities, according to a person familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak about the private conversation. During the call, Trump congratulated newly elected senators, who were gathered at the Library of Congress, according to the person.

Mike Bloomberg said he hopes Republicans will persuade President-elect Donald Trump to “rethink” his selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in part because “making it harder to get vaccines would be one of the most catastrophic mistakes in American history” and “a travesty beyond measure.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary, appeared to shower naked behind his wife, Cheryl Hines — seated, clothed and dry — as she encouraged her nearly 200,000 Instagram followers to buy discounted beauty products on Black Friday.

President Joe Biden isn’t the only one to pull a shocking and sudden reversal on pardoning his son Hunter Biden. So too, it seems, has the Democratic base.

As the dust settles on a pardon that the president and his White House repeatedly said would not happen, new polling shows Democrats suddenly embracing an idea they had strongly rejected before.

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, said the transition team is still confident that the Senate will confirm Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth after newly reported allegations of misconduct while he was running two veterans’ nonprofit groups.

We’re watching to see whether more Democrats come out against President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter. At least a dozen congressional Democrats criticized the pardon Monday, with perhaps the most blunt comment coming from Sen. Gary Peters (Michigan), chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Peters said on X that the pardon “was an improper use of power, it erodes trust in our government, and it emboldens others to bend justice to suit their interests.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) called it “wrong.”

President-elect Donald Trump again promised to block Nippon Steel’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel, threatening the fate of an already challenged deal.

The Biden administration is moving to phase out a Depression-era program that allows some employers to pay disabled workers far less than minimum wage, fulfilling one of President Joe Biden’s campaign promises and triggering what is likely to become a fierce legal and political battle.

The decision is the culmination of the Department of Labor’s year-long review of the program.

With the House back in session Tuesday night, we’re watching to see whether a privileged resolution is introduced to release the House Ethics Committee report on Matt Gaetz. Gaetz, who withdrew from consideration to be Trump’s attorney general last month, also said he would not be sworn in to the next Congress, which would have revived the Ethics Committee’s report on him.

President-elect Donald Trump tapped billionaire investment banker Warren Stephens to be his ambassador to Britain, a sought-after posting typically given to a major campaign donor.

Vivek Ramaswamy ran for president. Elon Musk runs one of the largest social media platforms.

Neither is set to hold a senior position in Donald Trump’s White House. But together, the two men are volunteering to lead a commission dubbed the “Department of Government Efficiency” — DOGE — which is explicitly tasked with cutting costs and reducing the size of government.

Health care is set to be among DOGE’s targets, both by dint of its sprawl and long-standing problems with waste, fraud and abuse.

President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he plans to nominate a fervent ally to lead the FBI was unusual for many reasons.

Chief among them: The position wasn’t actually slated to be open for another three years. The job of FBI director comes with a decade-long tenure that is an outlier among presidential appointees.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy say they’re hunting for ways to make American government more efficient. One possible target: the semiannual changing of the clock that so many Americans dislike.

“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Musk wrote last week on his social platform, X, linking to another user’s online poll that found most respondents wanted to end daylight saving time.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) is getting the chance to pick a new leader for House Republicans’ top super PAC. Politico first reported Monday night that Dan Conston, president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, is leaving his role after three election cycles. The next leader will be responsible for preserving the GOP’s thin House majority against likely headwinds in 2026.

Democrats suffered a stinging defeat at the ballot box, losing the presidency, the Senate and the House (as you know), leading to questions of who should lead the party out of the political wilderness.

SACRAMENTO — California lawmakers returned to the Capitol here on Monday to open an emergency special session aimed at establishing a multimillion-dollar legal fund to combat the incoming Trump administration’s expected barrage of lawsuits.

President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that he plans to travel to Paris on Saturday for the reopening of Notre Dame, after the cathedral was damaged in 2019 by a fire. It will be Trump’s first international trip as president-elect.

“It is an honor to announce that I will be traveling to Paris, France, on Saturday to attend the re-opening of the Magnificent and Historic Notre Dame Cathedral, which has been fully restored after a devastating fire five years ago,” Trump wrote on the social media site Truth Social. “President Emmanuel Macron has done a wonderful job ensuring that Notre Dame has been restored to its full level of glory, and even more so. It will be a very special day for all!”