Trump Administration Live Updates: Bill Clinton Is Questioned for Hours About Epstein

Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, who has been mediating the talks between American and Iranian representatives, said on social media that he met with Vice President JD Vance on Friday and that he looked “forward to further and decisive progress in the coming days.” Mr. Vance’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the meeting.

Mr. Trump expressed a much more negative view of the status of the talks.

“They cannot have nuclear weapons and we’re not thrilled with the way they’re negotiating, so we’ll see how it all works out,” he told reporters.

The president’s comments were the first from Americans officials since the United States and Iran held a six-hour round of negotiations on Thursday in Geneva. Iranian officials and Omani mediators said the sides had agreed to continue talking next week.

The United States military has positioned a huge military force in the Middle East, as Mr. Trump weighs strikes on a range of targets, including military and nuclear sites.

Also on Friday, the United States Embassy in Jerusalem told its workers that they may leave Israel, but warned that if they wanted to depart, they had to do so immediately.

Ambassador Mike Huckabee wrote in an email to embassy staff that those who wanted to leave “should do so TODAY.”

“There is no need to panic,” he added, “but for those desiring to leave, it’s important to make plans to depart sooner rather than later.”

Natan Odenheimer in Tel Aviv and David M. Halbfinger in Jerusalem contributed reporting.

Those wishing to leave “should do so TODAY,” Mr. Huckabee wrote, urging them to find flights out of Ben-Gurion Airport to any destination for which they could book passage. “There is no need to panic,” he added, “but for those desiring to leave, it’s important to make plans to depart sooner rather than later.”

The email, which was verified by three people with knowledge of the matter, made no explicit mention of Iran. It followed meetings and phone calls through the night, Mr. Huckabee wrote to employees, and resulted from “an abundance of caution” and conversations with the State Department in which officials agreed that the safety of embassy staff was a priority.

The embassy’s move “will likely result in high demand for airline seats today,” he said in the email. “Focus on getting a seat to anyplace from which you can then continue travel to DC, but the first priority will be getting expeditiously out of country.”

He added that while there might be more outbound flights in the coming days, there also might not be.

Already, KLM, the Dutch airline, has suspended service to Israel, citing “commercial and operational considerations.”

Israel is a likely target for retaliation by Iran or its allies if it is attacked by the United States.

In the email, Mr. Huckabee told embassy employees that the mission had shifted to an “authorized departure” footing as of 10 a.m. Friday. That allows nonessential personnel and their dependents to evacuate at the government’s expense when “U.S. national interests or imminent threat to life requires it,” according to State Department regulations.

Mr. Huckabee told embassy workers that he would hold a town-hall meeting to provide additional information at 12:30 p.m.

Later on Friday, the State Department announced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would travel to Israel early next week to discuss Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza.

Iran and the United States concluded a six-hour round of talks in Geneva on Thursday with neither a diplomatic breakthrough nor an impasse on American demands that Tehran completely dismantle its nuclear program.

Iranian officials and Omani mediators said the two sides had agreed to continue talking next week in an effort to avert war. But it was notable that the two American negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, remained silent about the current status of negotiations, with the White House declining to comment.

American officials have said that among the options Mr. Trump is considering are initial targeted strikes on military and nuclear sites in Iran to force the government into giving more concessions for a deal and, if that failed, more widespread strikes, including creating conditions for regime change.

The State Department issued a travel advisory on Friday in which it confirmed the shift to authorized departure for the U.S. mission in Israel, and urged other Americans to “reconsider travel” to both Israel and the West Bank, citing “terrorism and civil unrest.”

The State Department has taken precautions already elsewhere in the region. On Monday, the U.S. embassy in Lebanon ordered the departure of all nonemergency personnel and the family members of all government personnel.

Other countries are making similar moves. Australia said on Wednesday that the dependents of its diplomats in Israel and Lebanon should leave those countries, and has offered voluntary departures to the dependents of its staff in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan.

The United Kingdom said its diplomats had been pulled out of Iran and issued a warning against all travel to the country. The French foreign ministry also advised against traveling to Israel.

Adam Rasgon contributed reporting.

The decision opens with a line from Mr. Trump’s executive order setting two immutable genders as U.S. policy. Federal law “permits a federal agency employer to maintain single-sex bathrooms and similar intimate spaces,” the 2-to-1 majority wrote. “And it permits a federal agency employer to exclude employees, including trans-identifying employees, from opposite-sex facilities.”

The commission’s sole Democratic member, Kalpana Kotagal, issued a pointed dissent, describing the decision as rushed and legally suspect.

“The decision rests on the false premise that transgender workers are not worthy of the agency’s protection from discrimination and harassment and that protecting them threatens the rights of other workers,” Ms. Kotagal wrote. “Worse, it suggests that transgender people do not exist. That belief is contradicted by science and is not grounded in the law.”

The decision arose from a complaint made by an Army civilian IT specialist at Fort Riley, in Kansas, who had used male-designated bathrooms and locker rooms but in 2025 asked to use female bathrooms and locker rooms in keeping with her gender identity. Management rejected the request, citing the president’s executive order, and the complainant appealed.

While the E.E.O.C.’s primary role is to enforce federal civil rights laws in the private-sector workplace, it has some authority over complaints and appeals concerning the federal government.

Still, Thursday’s decision was ambitious. Neither Title VII nor the Supreme Court has defined “sex,” and the E.E.O.C. does not have authority to interpret the law. The majority of commissioners said it was doing so in this case “only because circumstances dictate we must.”

“There is an active controversy before us, and we cannot simply press the pause button to await authoritative guidance from the courts,” the decision read. “The appeal must be decided, one way or the other.”

Ms. Kotagal wrote, in her dissent, that the Supreme Court had “recognized the principles that underlie support for protections for transgender workers for decades.”

The decision also refers to the complainant as a male, saying: “A man who identifies as a ‘transwoman’ is still a man; a woman who identifies as a ‘transman’ is still a woman. Both may be excluded from opposite-sex bathrooms as such.”

Representative Mark Takano, Democrat of California and chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, condemned the decision as a “slap in the face to every American who has faced discrimination because of their gender identity.”

He added: “Authorizing vigilante bathroom police doesn’t just endanger transgender people — it puts every girl and woman at risk, especially those who don’t fit Republican extremists’ idea of what women ‘should’ look like or act.”

Calling the company “Leftwing nut jobs,” he said it had made a mistake trying to strong-arm the Pentagon. For days, Anthropic and the Pentagon have been locked in an escalating battle about how cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology will be used, and how it can aid in military operations.

Still, Mr. Trump announced a “Six Month phase out” for the Pentagon and some other agencies, which could allow for more extended negotiations between Anthropic and the Defense Department.

Mr. Trump’s statement came as the Pentagon and Anthropic were continuing to negotiate a compromise despite an escalating war of words. While some current and former American officials had expressed hope of some sort of deal before the Pentagon’s 5:01 p.m. deadline on Friday, Mr. Trump’s comments will undoubtedly complicate matters.

Mr. Trump’s post took Anthropic officials by surprise, according to people briefed on the discussions.

Democratic lawmakers quickly rallied to Anthropic’s side. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Mr. Trump and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, were trying to intimidate a leading American company, actions that pose a risk to defense readiness.

“The president’s directive to halt the use of a leading American A.I. company across the federal government, combined with inflammatory rhetoric attacking that company, raises serious concerns about whether national security decisions are being driven by careful analysis or political considerations,” Mr. Warner said.

Defense Department officials were already criticizing Anthropic’s leader in their own social media posts after the company on Thursday rejected their latest offer to settle the dispute. The Pentagon has threatened to either cut the company off from government business by declaring it a supply chain threat or force it to provide its frontier model without restrictions under the Defense Production Act.

On Thursday evening, Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official who oversees artificial intelligence, attacked Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, who earlier that day released a statement about why the company would not agree to the Defense Department’s latest terms.

“It’s a shame that @DarioAmodei is a liar and has a God-complex,” Mr. Michael wrote. “He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk. The @DeptofWar will ALWAYS adhere to the law but not bend to whims of any one for-profit tech company.”

On the surface, the battle between the Pentagon and Anthropic is a contract dispute over technical details of how the artificial model works, and the military’s use of it. But as Mr. Trump’s comments showed, it has also ballooned into a deeply political fight.

The Pentagon wants all its contractors to adhere to a single standard — that the military can use what it buys however it wants, as long as it complies with the law. But Pentagon officials have also been happy to beat up on tech companies, particularly ones the Trump administration has branded as “woke.”

For Anthropic, a firm that prioritizes both national security and technological safety, the political stakes are high. Supporters cheered Mr. Amodei’s assertion that his company would not bend or allow its model to be used for mass surveillance of Americans or to command pilotless drones.

The company has said it is willing to continue negotiating but will not back down from its red lines.

Employees at the company have cheered their chief executive’s firm stance. And in a rare moment of unity across Silicon Valley A.I. companies, employees at two of Anthropic’s competitors, OpenAI and Google, signed letters backing Anthropic’s position.

One letter published Thursday was signed by nearly 50 employees at OpenAI and 175 at Google. It criticized the Pentagon’s negotiating tactics and called on its leaders to “put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War’s current demands.”

“They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in,” the letter said.

In their initial potential compromise, the Pentagon said on Thursday that it had no interest in using Anthropic’s model that works on classified systems for either mass surveillance or fully autonomous weaponry. But in rejecting that offer, Anthropic said the Pentagon’s assertion that it would not use the model, called Claude, for those purposes was undercut by the legal language in the contract.

“In a narrow set of cases, we believe A.I. can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values,” Mr. Amodei wrote. “Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do.”

Mr. Trump’s post appears to render moot the Friday deadline set by the Pentagon. But it may or may not derail the talks between the company and military officials. And the Pentagon could still take action on Friday.

Former government officials and people familiar with the negotiations had said that any action by the Pentagon to label the company a supply chain risk or to force it to comply with the Defense Production Act would likely prompt legal action by Anthropic. Mr. Trump’s order could do the same.

While many of the uses of artificial intelligence to assist military operations on the ground are still in a developmental stage, the models are actively used for intelligence analysis. Forcing Claude off government computers would hurt analysts at the National Security Agency sifting through overseas communications intercepts. It could also hamper C.I.A. analysts searching for patterns in intelligence reports.

Former officials have said C.I.A. officials are anxious to find a way to continue to use Claude, which has sped up their work and deepened their analysis. But before Mr. Trump’s comments, officials had warned that any order by the president could force the agency to find other solutions.

The Pentagon is ready to move forward with Grok, produced by Elon Musk’s xAI, on its classified system. But Grok is considered by current and former government officials to be an inferior product. And switching A.I. software would take time and almost certainly cause disruption.

The case, first reported by the Buffalo nonprofit news outlet Investigative Post, triggered outrage across New York State. Public officials and immigration advocates expressed dismay over the officers’ decision to drive the refugee, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, 56, to the coffee shop without apparently telling his relatives or his lawyer where he was. City officials said that Mr. Shah Alam could not speak English.

The circumstances that spelled the fate of Mr. Shah Alam remain murky. His body was found at about 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, miles away from the Tim Hortons restaurant where the officers had released him from their custody. The Buffalo Police Department said that he had died of health complications but did not further specify the results of an autopsy report.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said in an emailed statement that the officers had offered Mr. Shah Alam a courtesy ride after he was released from the jail, and that he accepted. The officials said that they dropped him off at the Tim Hortons, which they determined to be a “warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station.”

“He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues or disabilities requiring special assistance,” the email from Customs and Border Protection said.

It remained unclear on Thursday why the Border Patrol agents had released Mr. Shah Alam. The statement from the agency did not address that, saying only that Mr. Shah Alam was “not amenable to removal” back to Myanmar, without further explanation.

Customs and Border Protection referred questions about his disappearance and death to the Buffalo Police Department. An autopsy had ruled that Mr. Shah Alam’s death was not a homicide.

Sean M. Ryan, the mayor of Buffalo, released a statement calling the decision “unprofessional and inhumane.”

“Buffalo is a city that welcomes refugees and believes government should protect human dignity, not endanger it,” Mr. Ryan, a Democrat, said. “U.S. Customs and Border Protection failed that basic standard.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has a home in Buffalo, accused the federal government of carrying out what she described as a rogue deportation agenda. She called for an independent investigation into the death of Mr. Shah Alam and into the arrest of a Columbia University student on Thursday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who school officials said had misrepresented themselves to gain access to a private area.

“New York will not look the other way,” Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement. “If Washington won’t restore order and take action, New York will.”

Many questions remain unanswered about Mr. Shah Alam’s death — and about his life in Buffalo. Federal officials said that he had arrived as a refugee in the United States on Christmas Eve 2024.

His relatives, who had reportedly been searching for him after federal agents took custody of him, declined to speak and directed inquiries about his disappearance to his lawyer. In a statement, the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo, which represented Mr. Shah Alam, said that he was in the United States lawfully under refugee status.

The Erie County District Attorney’s Office said it was investigating the death.

Kaitlyn A. Munro, a spokeswoman for the district attorney, said that Mr. Shah Alam had spent a year in jail after he was arrested in Buffalo’s Riverside neighborhood. A police report asserted that he had trespassed onto a woman’s property on the morning of Feb. 15, 2025, damaging her shed door and allowing her dog to run out of the yard through an open gate. When the police arrived, Mr. Shah Alam was holding two long black poles and swinging them at the officers, the report said. A scuffle ensued, and the officers were injured.

Benjamin Macaluso, his lawyer with the Legal Aid Bureau, told the Investigative Post that Mr. Shah Alam had gone out on a walk and purchased a curtain rod to use as a walking stick. When he tried to return home, he got lost and ended up at a stranger’s house as she was letting her dog out.

Mr. Macaluso said that the woman called the police, who ordered Mr. Shah Alam to drop his curtain rod. But Mr. Shah Alam could not understand or see the officers clearly, and after he did not comply with repeated orders, the two officers deployed a Taser on him and tackled and beat him, Mr. Macaluso told the Investigative Post.

The next day, he was arraigned in Buffalo City Court and held on bail set at $25,000. A federal immigration detainer was issued after his arrest, which meant that law enforcement officials would notify federal officials if he was released. Despite his legal status as a refugee, the Legal Aid Bureau said, his legal team chose not to post bail for fear that he would disappear into immigration custody.

Mr. Shah Alam was later indicted by a grand jury on felony assault, burglary and criminal mischief charges. At his arraignment in June, his bail was reduced to $5,000. On Feb. 9, he had reached a deal with the district attorney, pleading guilty before Judge James Bargnesi of Erie County Court to a class A misdemeanor charge for criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree and a class B misdemeanor charge for criminal trespass.

Ms. Munro said that the office had decided to reduce his charges after evaluating his conduct and criminal history, as well as the “significant collateral consequences that would result from a felony conviction — including mandatory deportation.”

The agreement required that Mr. Shah Alam remain in custody until his sentencing on March 24. But the Legal Aid Bureau said that an outside immigration attorney had advised the family that it was safe to post bail without fear of detention or deportation by federal authorities, and Mr. Shah Alam did so on Feb. 19, with the federal immigration detainer in place.

The Erie County Sheriff’s Office said that it had released Mr. Shah Alam from custody at the Erie County Holding Center and followed its usual practice of notifying federal officials because of the immigration detainer requested for him. Border Patrol agents arrived at the holding center before Mr. Shah Alam was freed.

The district attorney’s office was informed five days later that Mr. Shah Alam had been released before the arranged date.

“Mr. Alam was extremely vulnerable,” the Legal Aid Bureau said in a statement. “He had only been in the U.S. for a few months prior to his arrest. He would not have known where he was or had the wherewithal to contact his family or avail himself of other resources or services that could have assisted him.”

Michael J. Keane, the Erie County district attorney, expressed sympathy to Mr. Shah Alam’s family and friends.

Once his office receives Mr. Shah Alam’s death certificate, Mr. Keane, a Democrat, said that his office plans to dismiss all criminal charges.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting.

A preliminary internal report on the incident said Customs and Border Protection had not notified the Defense Department it was launching a drone in that area. So to the military, it was an unknown drone, a Pentagon official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an investigation into the matter.

The F.A.A. did not know the system would be used and had not authorized it. When it was, the F.A.A. played the card it had used before: It shut down airspace.

In a joint statement issued late Thursday, the Pentagon, the F.A.A. and Customs and Border Protection presented a united front, stating that they were “working together in an unprecedented fashion to mitigate drone threats by Mexican cartels and foreign terrorist organizations at the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Behind the scenes was the troubling lack of cohesion and trust among three agencies, said five people who had participated in or been briefed on interagency discussions about the lasers and spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential matters.

Some lawmakers and civilians say they are increasingly worried that if a referee does not forge better coordination, the situation could have dire consequences.

“Congress needs to step in with all dispatch to direct D.O.D. to fully involve the F.A.A.,” Roy Goldberg, an aviation lawyer at the Washington firm Clark Hill, said in an email to The New York Times. “It is paramount that F.A.A. be fully involved and not walled off by Pentagon officials.”

At the heart of the standoff is a debate over security versus safety.

Immigration and Defense Department officials say they need systems like this in their arsenal to protect the border with Mexico. Aviation officials say they are charged with making sure technology is not misused in a way that might bring down an aircraft.

Bad blood between the agencies has been brewing for weeks, if not longer.

Officials at the Pentagon and the F.A.A. have been exchanging snippy emails about the Defense Department’s right to fire off high-energy lasers without the aviation agency’s permission. The Pentagon has argued it does not need it; the F.A.A. disagrees.

That dispute escalated into a major shutdown of airspace late on Feb. 10, when the F.A.A. closed airspace over El Paso for seven hours after Customs and Border Protection shot down a foreign object in a suburb of the city, just over the New Mexico line, using a laser it had been lent by the Army.

The successive episodes involving high-energy lasers shooting down first what turned out to be a metallic balloon and more recently a U.S. government-owned drone have prompted recriminations from Capitol Hill, where some Democrats have called for multiple inspectors general to open investigations.

The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have embraced high-energy lasers as an efficient and cost-effective tool to combat drug smuggling by Mexican cartels. Last year, a counter-drone official with Homeland Security told Congress that organizations hostile to law enforcement had flown about 27,000 drones within 500 meters of the border in the first half of 2024.

It is unclear whether the operators who fired at the Customs and Border Protection drone on Thursday believed they were aiming at one belonging to a cartel, or if the drone appeared to originate in Mexico. Fort Hancock is a sparsely populated town along the border, near El Paso.

The F.A.A. said in a statement late Thursday that its latest flight restriction was an expansion of an existing one in the area and was not expected to affect commercial flights.

The restriction extends until late June, though it is likely to be lifted before then if the F.A.A. and the Pentagon come to an agreement.

After Customs and Border Protection used the Pentagon’s weapon to shoot down a balloon this month, the F.A.A. announced it would be issuing a similar closure of the airspace over El Paso for 10 days, only to lift the restrictions hours later under pressure from the White House, disrupting travel and shocking the local authorities.

In the weeks since, a heated debate has broken out over the laws governing when and how the F.A.A. and the Transportation Department must be looped into other agencies’ decisions to deploy high-energy lasers as part of counter-drone operations.

The law states that the Pentagon “shall coordinate” with the heads of the Transportation Department and the F.A.A. before rolling out plans to disable or destroy drones, if the means might affect aviation safety, civilian aviation and aerospace operations. Congress recently added the stipulation that if such potential dangers are identified, the Pentagon must work with the Transportation Department “to mitigate adverse impacts.”

The Department of Homeland Security is subject to similar coordination requirements under a different section of the law.

Lawmakers on Thursday pressed a Pentagon official, Mark Roosevelt Ditlevson, to explain why the Defense Department allowed high-energy lasers to be shot in El Paso airspace over the objections of the F.A.A. In a hearing to consider his nomination to become the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, Mr. Ditlevson was asked repeatedly about the use of those lasers.

“The Department of War always cares about safety, and we want to defend this country and defend Americans,” he said. “We don’t want to ever do anything that would be unsafe.”

Under the relevant authorities covering Fort Bliss, the Army base in that area, he added, the statutory requirement “is to coordinate with the F.A.A. It does not require approval from the F.A.A.”

“But I can assure you,” Mr. Ditlevson continued, “most importantly, this system is incredibly safe.” A moment later, he added: “We continue to work together.”

Some found his explanation unconvincing.

“The coordination failed,” replied Senator Jack Reed, the Democrat of Rhode Island who had been questioning him.

On Thursday night, the top Democrats on three panels overseeing aviation and homeland security released a joint statement expressing outrage that the Pentagon had shot down a drone belonging to another branch of government.

“Our heads are exploding,” Representatives Rick Larsen of Washington, Andre Carson of Indiana and Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi said in a joint statement, calling attention to proposed legislation to train counter-drone operators and improve coordination between the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security and the F.A.A.

In a statement, Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, the top Democrat on that chamber’s aviation subcommittee, said she would ask for the inspectors general at the Defense, Homeland Security and Transportation Departments to begin a joint investigation into both of the high-energy laser incidents that prompted the F.A.A. to shut down airspace near El Paso and Fort Hancock.

“The Trump administration’s incompetence continues to cause chaos in our skies,” Ms. Duckworth said, adding, “The situation is alarming and demands a thorough, independent investigation.”

Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.

In addition, F.B.I. agents recently interviewed at least one retired agent who in 2022 was involved in deliberations with the Justice Department over opening the investigation into Mr. Trump’s plan to create a false slate of electors in swing states in an effort to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election. The agents conducting the interviews, who are based in Washington, said they were asking on behalf of agents based in Florida, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Already, prosecutors in the Miami office had issued subpoenas in November for documents related to a January 2017 intelligence community assessment about Russia’s election interference, and last month, they issued a second round to the same recipients seeking similar materials from an expanded date range.

Altogether, the developments suggest that Mr. Reding Quiñones is making good on hopes by some allies of Mr. Trump that he would pursue a criminal investigation into what they have cast as a “grand conspiracy,” targeting numerous former officials who had investigated the president. The idea relies on portraying disparate investigations as a unified “deep state” plot to violate his constitutional rights.

The people familiar with the recent rounds of subpoenas and interviews spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. The Justice Department press office declined to comment.

Two of the three major investigative matters involving Mr. Trump — the inquiry into Russia and the 2016 election and the inquiry into his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election — concern events that mainly took place in and around Washington. The Russia matter also predates the usual five-year statute of limitations to bring federal charges.

But by tying them to the third, the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents, in which F.B.I. agents searched his Mar-a-Lago social club and estate in Palm Beach, Fla., in August 2022, Mr. Trump’s allies have argued they can still pursue all those earlier matters as part of a purported unified conspiracy. Doing so also allows the administration to bring issues before a grand jury in Florida, which would draw jurors from a less Democratic pool.

There is no evidence that the three inquiries were a single plot. In addition, past administrations, including a special counsel appointed in Mr. Trump’s first term, have thoroughly scrutinized the law enforcement and intelligence response to Russia’s 2016 election interference.

But in his second term, Mr. Trump has openly imposed White House control over the Justice Department and pushed it to charge his enemies, ousting prosecutors who balked over lack of sufficient evidence.

In September, Mr. Trump publicly demanded that Attorney General Pam Bondi charge James B. Comey Jr., the former F.B.I. director, with perjury over 2020 congressional testimony before the statute of limitations ran out. The department ousted a U.S. attorney who refused to do so, and a successor obtained the indictment, only for a judge to throw out the charges and rule that the prosecutor who brought charges had been unlawfully appointed.

The more recent subpoenas issued in January suggest officials moving hastily in requesting documents about the Russia investigation. Two people familiar with the matter described how law enforcement officials appeared to have used the November subpoena as a template, which sought files related to the preparation of the 2017 intelligence community assessment. In substituting the phrase “Russian interference in the 2016 election,” the officials neglected to remove the words “preparation of,” creating an odd garble, the people said.

The focus on the intelligence community assessment appears to be driven by allegations from Mr. Trump’s allies that John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, made a false statement to Congress in a 2023 deposition related to the Steele dossier, a compendium of discredited opposition research alleging various ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.

The F.B.I. wanted to include information from the dossier in the 2017 assessment, but C.I.A. analysts balked. Mr. Brennan referred to that dispute in his deposition, saying that “the C.I.A. was very much opposed to having any reference or inclusion of the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment.”

Ultimately, as a compromise, a summary of it was attached to the assessment as an appendix, as Mr. Brennan and others had long said. Documents declassified by the Trump administration last year complicated that account by showing that a sentence in the final draft of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the appendix.

The files also indicated that when C.I.A. analysts objected to including information from the dossier as an appendix, Mr. Brennan pushed back in support of the compromise arrangement.

In October, Representative Jim Jordan, a Trump ally and Ohio Republican, made a criminal referral, saying Mr. Brennan’s statement about the C.I.A.’s opposition amounted to a false statement in light of his own attitude in that exchange. Mr. Brennan’s lawyer, Kenneth Wainstein, has said it did not.

The subpoena covering an expanded date range of documents about the intelligence community assessment was notable for another reason. Issued in late January, it came from a grand jury that sits in Miami.

The location is significant because Mr. Reding Quiñones had earlier asked the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga, to convene a special additional grand jury at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla. It was scheduled to start in mid-January, but Mr. Reding Quiñones did not use it for the latest subpoena.

Any investigation conducted by a grand jury in Fort Pierce would be overseen by Judge Aileen M. Cannon. She oversaw — and eventually threw out — the case against Mr. Trump over classified documents, and issued numerous rulings in his favor. This week, she permanently barred the release of a special counsel report on that matter.

Mr. Trump’s allies had openly gloated about the possibility of putting Judge Cannon in charge of mediating disputes over matters like requests to quash a subpoena or compel a recalcitrant witness to testify.

In December, Mr. Wainstein wrote to Judge Altonaga to complain that the prosecution appeared to be preparing to move the investigation to Fort Pierce and asked the judge to block any such effort.

Judge Altonaga has yet to publicly respond to the letter, and it is unclear whether she has acted behind the scenes. But for now, the subpoena from late January indicates that the grand conspiracy investigation remains in Miami.

The suits filed on Thursday did not directly mention the Trump administration’s broader allegations of what it calls voter fraud, which the government has used elsewhere to justify efforts to seize ballots and other voting records. Mr. Trump has also recently pushed legislation to address his debunked claims of widespread election fraud, and his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

In 2024, Republicans won every statewide race, every House seat and supermajorities in the state legislatures in Utah, Oklahoma and West Virginia. Kentucky, which has a Democratic governor, has a single Democratic congressman: Representative Morgan McGarvey. The top elections officials in Utah, West Virginia and Kentucky are Republicans. The top elections official in Oklahoma is elected to two-year terms by the Republican-dominated state senate.

The offices of Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gov. Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia did not respond to requests for comment.

Sarah Corley, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, did not directly comment on the lawsuit, writing in a statement that “Oklahoma has led the nation in secure and transparent elections and strict voter I.D. laws” and referred questions about the suit to the state’s election agency, which did not respond to a request for comment.

New Jersey is largely governed by Democrats. Representatives of Gov. Mikie Sherrill and Lt. Gov. Dale G. Caldwell, the top elections official in the state, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Justice Department has asked nearly every state for their complete, unredacted voter rolls in a quest to essentially establish a national voting database before the midterms. Mr. Trump has called for Republicans to “nationalize” elections, though the Constitution leaves their administration to the states.

So far, roughly 11 Republican-governed states have complied with the requests for voter data, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, while the states with Republican leadership targeted by the Justice Department lawsuits on Thursday have not.

The Justice Department has now sued 29 states and the District of Columbia as part of its effort to seize voter data. Federal judges have dismissed those lawsuits in three early cases — California, Michigan and Oregon — in rulings that rebuked the Trump administration. Two of the judges issued explicit warnings that, in their view, the Trump administration could not be trusted and that its efforts to centralize the electoral process posed a serious risk.

For nearly a decade, Mr. Trump has claimed without evidence that elections in the United States are “rigged,” beginning with his debunked claim that millions of illegal immigrants had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, depriving him of a symbolic win in the popular vote even as he won the vote in the electoral college. Those false claims culminated in an effort to subvert his loss in the 2020 election.

In the years since, Mr. Trump and his allies have continued to spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump, and he has repeatedly amplified that claim since returning to office last year. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that his second term, which ends in 2029, “should be my third term,” falsely asserting that he had beaten his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly returned to the specter of noncitizen voting to justify his false claims and his push to limit voting rights, even though a preliminary analysis of immigrant voting commissioned by the Trump administration provided no evidence of widespread or even significant voter fraud. And he has shown an increased eagerness to leverage the full investigative, prosecutorial and legislative powers of the federal government to bend election mechanics to his will.

“The court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders,” wrote Judge Schiltz, who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush.

Across the country, federal judges have repeatedly called out Trump administration officials in recent weeks for testifying dishonestly, representing the law inaccurately and failing to comply promptly with their orders, especially on immigration-related matters. Tensions between the judiciary and the Trump administration have been especially high in Minnesota, where the courts have been overwhelmed with lawsuits stemming from a crackdown on illegal immigration.

On Thursday, Judge Schiltz identified 210 orders issued in 143 cases in Minnesota in which he said Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had not complied with court orders. Federal officials had previously taken issue with Judge Schiltz’s characterization of their compliance with orders.

Read Judge Schiltz’s Order

Read Document 41 pages

In his opinion, the judge quoted from an email that he said was sent to him by Daniel N. Rosen, the state’s top federal prosecutor, that acknowledged some missteps but argued that the judge had overstated their scope.

Judge Schiltz acknowledged in his ruling that federal officials had not disobeyed orders in some cases he had previously cited, but noted dozens of additional examples where he said the government did not obey a judge’s instructions. Among the errors: missing deadlines for releasing detainees, transferring a detainee to Texas against a judge’s order and not filing required updates with the court.

Mr. Rosen declined to comment on Thursday. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota has seen an exodus of experienced lawyers in recent weeks who said they objected to the Justice Department’s handling of immigration-related matters, including the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, by an ICE agent.

In the email that Judge Schiltz quoted from, sent on Feb. 9, Mr. Rosen pledged to “redouble our efforts to achieve compliance,” but complained that “the lawyers in my civil division didn’t deserve” to be criticized by the judge in the way they were.

On Thursday, Judge Schiltz questioned the sincerity of Mr. Rosen’s promise to improve — “This, too, appears to be untrue,” the judge wrote — and noted that the government had continued to fail to comply with orders.

Judge Schiltz also expressed some sympathy for lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office, saying judges had been patient with them, “recognizing that they have been put in an impossible position by Rosen and his superiors in the Department of Justice.”

“What those attorneys ‘didn’t deserve’ was the administration sending 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota to detain people without making any provision for handling the hundreds of lawsuits that were sure to follow,” the judge added.

The relationship between a district’s chief judge and its top federal prosecutor is normally a collegial one, and the order from Judge Schiltz marked an extraordinary break between Minnesota’s federal judiciary and Mr. Rosen’s office.

This year, two judges on the court that Judge Schiltz leads, including one of President Trump’s appointees, have found the administration in civil contempt for disobeying judicial orders, a remedy that judges have only used against the executive branch a handful of times.

Civil contempt rulings are intended to encourage compliance by imposing a penalty. On Thursday, Judge Schiltz threatened to go further and potentially sanction government officials with criminal contempt, which punishes willful defiance of the courts with fines or imprisonment.

Judge Schiltz, who decades ago clerked for Justice Antonin G. Scalia, had in recent weeks showed flashes of growing frustration and anger with the Trump administration, emerging as an unexpected new critic of the administration’s tactics in court. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security referred to the concerns expressed in one of his previous orders as a “diatribe from this activist judge.”

In a court filing late last month, Mr. Rosen said that the flood of lawsuits filed by immigrants contesting their detention had strained his office, forcing prosecutors to put off other cases.

“The Court is setting deadlines within hours, including weekends and holidays,” Mr. Rosen wrote. “Paralegals are continuously working overtime. Lawyers are continuously working overtime.”

The office is contending with a severe staff shortage that worsened early this year as several of the office’s most experienced litigators resigned in protest over aspects of the immigration crackdown.

At the end of the Biden administration, the office had 64 prosecutors, Mr. Rosen said during a news conference on Wednesday. As of this week, it had 36. Among the lawyers who recently departed was Ana Voss, who had been the head of the civil division, which handles lawsuits filed by immigrants.

Also, Jim Stolley, the chief counsel for ICE in the state, retired early this month. Mr. Stolley, a veteran of the agency, did not publicly address the timing of his departure.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rosen said that his office was hoping to add several new attorneys soon. “We’re hiring at a good clip,” he said.