Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Allows Mass Firings to Proceed

“The first month of President Trump’s second administration has been defined by an onslaught of executive actions that have caused, some say by design, disruption and even chaos in widespread quarters of American society,” Judge Cooper wrote.

Still, he said, “federal district judges are duty-bound to decide legal issues based on even-handed application of law and precedent — no matter the identity of the litigants or, regrettably at times, the consequences of their rulings for average people.”

Judge Cooper said that he was denying the unions’ request that he block the Trump administration from continuing its downsizing efforts because the matter should be first addressed with the agency that adjudicates labor disputes between federal employee unions and management, known as the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

Judge Cooper noted that if the unions lose in that venue, they could resume their court battle through the federal court of appeals.

Judge Cooper’s ruling in the case was similar to one that was made in a separate case last week by a judge in Massachusetts. In that case, the judge agreed labor unions representing federal workers did not have standing to challenge the Trump administration’s actions in federal court.

Ms. Johnson is set to formalize a role that she had taken on at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, which included her, at Mr. Trump’s request, submitting a list of people who she believed deserved clemency.

Mr. Trump said that Ms. Johnson would be advising him on cases of people convicted of nonviolent crimes who had gotten sentences not likely be handed down today. Ms. Johnson’s case was seen as an example of draconian sentencing laws that disproportionately affected nonviolent offenders, particularly women and members of minority groups.

“You know, Alice was in prison for doing something that today probably wouldn’t even be prosecuted,” Mr. Trump said during remarks to about 400 people during the event. “She spent 22 years in prison — 22 years. She had another 22 years left. Can you believe it?”

“It should not have happened,” he added of her case. “It should not have happened. So you’re going to look, and you’re going to make recommendations, and I’ll follow those recommendations.”

The New York Times previously reported that Ms. Johnson was under consideration for such a role.

Ms. Johnson’s case became a rallying cry for reform after a viral video of her speaking from prison caught the attention of Ms. Kardashian. In 2018, Ms. Kardashian personally pleaded Ms. Johnson’s case to Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

Ms. Johnson had been in an Alabama federal prison since 1996 after being sentenced to life plus 25 years in prison as a first-time, nonviolent offender. She had been convicted of cocaine possession and money laundering in a drug conspiracy case.

A week after the Oval Office meeting with Ms. Kardashian, Mr. Trump commuted the sentence of Ms. Johnson, who was then 63 years old. In 2020 as he was campaigning for re-election, he issued a full pardon, wiping the conviction from her record.

Ms. Johnson was also an integral part of Mr. Trump embracing legislation called the First Step Act, one of the most consequential criminal justice reform bills in decades.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

You can’t take our country — and you can’t take our game.

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) February 21, 2025

As senators slowly made their way into the chamber late Thursday afternoon, it was clear that Washington was in for a long night. Aides hauled thick briefing folders in one hand and caffeinated beverages in another.

Republicans were there to make the case for their budget resolution, which must be adopted to allow them to push through President Trump’s ambitious agenda. Democrats came primed to build their public case against Mr. Trump’s plans, and begin laying the groundwork to exact a political price from Republicans for supporting them.

“This is going to be a long, drawn-out fight,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said as members of his party lined up to offer amendments to fight Mr. Trump’s fiscal agenda. “Democrats are going to hold the floor all day long and all night long to expose how Republicans want to cut taxes for billionaires while gutting things Americans care about most.”

Passing a budget resolution is a key step toward enacting Mr. Trump’s fiscal agenda, a process that has been complicated by competing strategies among House and Senate Republicans about the best way to accomplish the president’s priorities.

“People are counting on us,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the chairman of the Budget Committee, declared on the floor moments before the rally of votes began. “They’re counting on this Republican majority to give the president the money he needs to do the job that he promised to do, and we’re going to deliver.”

“If it’s 5 o’clock in the morning — I don’t care how long it takes,” Mr. Graham added. By late Thursday evening, that seemed very possible.

For Democrats, who do not have enough votes to block Republicans’ budget, the vote-a-rama was a way to slow its roll, challenge G.O.P. priorities and, when possible, force Republicans into uncomfortable votes intended to create a damaging record to attack them on during next year’s midterm elections. The rules of the Senate allow members to propose an unlimited number of budget amendments, meaning voting can continue until Democrats lose steam and allow the debate to come to a close.

Their first attempt to box in G.O.P. senators came in the form of a proposal that would bar tax cuts for any individual making more than $1 billion a year. It was meant to drive home Democrats’ argument that Republicans want to slash spending for ordinary Americans just to reward billionaires with tax cuts.

“I ask my Republican colleagues: Yes or no? Do you believe billionaires should get another tax break or not?” Mr. Schumer said as he introduced the proposal. It failed nearly entirely along party lines, setting the tone for a night when Democrats were not expected to prevail in making any substantive change to the budget blueprint.

As the night wore on, Democrats offered up similar proposals to protect food pricing and Medicaid funding.

Even before midnight, senators were leaning on staff members and aides to keep them on track with their wonky procedural remarks. Several Republicans who presided over the chamber, including Senators Roger Marshall of Kansas and Jim Banks of Indiana, read their procedural lines from a placard on the desk or repeated them verbatim from a clerk on the dais.

After Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, introduced an amendment that would declare the Senate opposed to any health care spending cuts should the House send it a bill that shrank Medicaid or other health programs, one of his aides had to step in and remind him of what to say next.

“If they send us something that cuts health care severely, we’ll be on record as being for protecting health care, and I yield back,” Mr. Wyden said after urging his colleagues to support his amendment. “No, no, it’s, ‘I move to waive,’” said an aide seated next to Mr. Wyden, lurching forward and pointing to the page on the lectern in front of the senator. Mr. Wyden corrected himself.

Most of the votes played out along partisan lines, but some Republicans broke with their party to back Democratic proposals.

Two Republican senators broke ranks on multiple occasions during the night. Senator Susan Collins of Maine backed two Democratic proposals aimed at blocking tax cuts for the superrich, while both she and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri supported a measure to protect Medicaid funding for maternal health care. Mr. Hawley also voted in favor of an amendment seeking to curb the influence of hedge funds in the single-family housing market.

Despite those defections, the amendments failed. Still, Ms. Collins’s and Mr. Hawley’s votes could serve as political insulation down the line, allowing them to claim independence from party orthodoxy when it proves useful.

Maya C. Miller contributed reporting.

Administrative law judges preside over administrative hearings in executive branch agencies. They are executive branch officials, not life-tenured members of the judicial branch, but they still perform judges’ role, including by administering oaths, taking testimony, ruling on evidentiary questions, and making factual and legal determinations.

Examples of such officials include Social Security Administration judges who handle disputes about disability and retirement benefits; National Labor Relations Board judges who resolve unfair labor practice cases; and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission judges who hear disputes about matters like electric utilities and regional grids.

To insulate the officials from political interference, Congress enacted a statute that says disciplinary action, including firings, may be taken against such judges “only for good cause established and determined by the Merit Systems Protection Board on the record after opportunity for hearing before the board.”

Ms. Harris’s letter to Congress also brought to wider attention that the Justice Department had said it would no longer defend the constitutionality of the law protecting administrative law judges in a little-noticed Feb. 11 filing in an appeals court case.

In that case, a paint company is challenging a fine imposed by an administrative law judge at the Transportation Department for violating a federal rule that requires paint cans to be packaged in a way that will keep them from leaking when transported on planes. The company is arguing, among other points, that because the president cannot remove such a judge at will, the judge’s position is unconstitutional.

In agreeing with that view, Ms. Harris pointed to a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a statute in which Congress had set up a certain government agency to have two layers of insulation from presidential control. The agency’s board members could be removed only for cause, and they, in turn, were overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose members could also be removed only for cause.

In the same way, Ms. Harris said, administrative law judges are not only protected by the statute that says they can be removed only for cause, but Congress put the decision over whether there was cause for termination not in the hands of the president but in those of the Merit Systems Protection Board.

That board — a key part of civil service protections Congress established to professionalize the federal work force and guard against political patronage — is itself insulated from direct presidential control by a statute that says its members “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”

Notably, Mr. Trump has already violated the latter statute by summarily firing Cathy Harris, the chairwoman of the board, prompting her to sue. On Tuesday, a federal judge temporarily reinstated her, though the Trump administration has appealed.

Sarah M. Harris previously told Congress that the administration considered limits on firing members of independent agencies to be unconstitutional as well.

The Trump administration has embraced an ideology called the unitary executive theory. That doctrine says the Constitution should be reinterpreted to prohibit Congress from placing any limits on the president’s ability to impose total control on the executive branch, including to fire subordinates at will.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has violated numerous statutes in which Congress set limits on when various types of officials can be fired, including inspectors general, members of independent agencies and civil servants.

Many of the firings have led to lawsuits, setting up test cases to see if the Supreme Court will strike down those statutes and expand the power of Mr. Trump and future presidents.

In a statement, Chad Mizelle, the chief of staff to Attorney General Pam Bondi, hailed the administration’s move to challenge the statute insulating administrative law judges from political interference by the White House.

“Unelected and constitutionally unaccountable A.L.J.s have exercised immense power for far too long,” he said. “In accordance with Supreme Court precedent, the department is restoring constitutional accountability so that executive branch officials answer to the president and to the people.”

The motion did not say why the case was being dropped.

The Justice Department had filed the case against SpaceX on Aug. 23, 2023, accusing the company of violating federal law in its hiring practices.

SpaceX did not fairly consider job applications from refugees and people who have been granted asylum in the United States, the department said. SpaceX also discouraged refugees and asylees from applying for jobs, refused to hire them even when they were qualified, and rejected them repeatedly because of their citizenship status, the department said.

Mr. Musk had said at the time that SpaceX was told it could not hire anyone who was not a citizen or permanent resident of the United States because of export control laws. “This is yet another case of weaponization of the DOJ for political purposes,” he had posted on X.

The Justice Department had rejected that position, saying that export control laws posed no such restrictions.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Last week, three flights were sent to Panama with people from countries such as China and Iran, where arranging deportations is more complicated for the United States because of a lack of diplomatic relations with their governments or other roadblocks.

In Panama, the migrants managed to communicate with reporters from The New York Times while being held in a hotel, drawing attention to their uncertain situation. Some said they had left their countries to escape persecution and feared for their safety if they were to be sent back.

Thursday, when the plane landed at Juan Santamaría International Airport outside San José, a group of reporters that had gathered on the tarmac captured images of the migrants on board.

They held their cellphones to the windows, revealing both that they were not in handcuffs and had not had their devices taken away.

Officials said 135 people were on the flight: 65 children and 70 adults, including one older person and two pregnant women. “They are all families; they come as family units,” said Omer Badilla, the deputy minister of governance and director of Costa Rica’s migration authority.

Another 65 migrants would be arriving to the country in the coming days, Mr. Badilla said, noting that Costa Rica had committed to receiving 200 migrants in total.

The flight carried people from more than a dozen nations, officials said. More than half of the group was from just a few countries: Uzbekistan, China and Armenia.

There were also people on board from Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, Russia and Georgia.

Asked by a reporter what would happen to the people who refused to be returned to their country of origin, Mr. Badilla said: “Most, or almost all, want to return to their countries. Specific cases will be addressed if there is a particular request.”

He said: “This is simply a request from the United States for collaboration. We understand that they already were in the deportation process, and what the U.S. is doing is seeking an ally to assist in supplying a platform for transporting them to their countries.”

The plane was surrounded by about 20 police officers. The deportees were disembarked at a distance from the scrum of reporters and immediately boarded onto several buses marked “tourism” that were waiting on the runway.

When Costa Rica’s president, Rodrigo Chaves, spoke of the flight at a news conference this week, he said his country’s government had felt compelled to accept the deportees in particular because they included children.

Costa Rica has touted its record on upholding human rights, including when it comes to the treatment of migrants.

From the airport, the migrants would be transferred to a remote facility called the Temporary Attention Center for Migrants, officials said. It lies in the southern canton of Corredores, more than 200 miles from the capital.

“We’ve thrown out the possibility of a hotel, precisely to avoid a situation similar to that in Panama,” Mr. Badilla, the migration official, told The Associated Press.

Costa Rica’s government has stipulated that the migrants remain in the country no more than 30 days before being sent to their countries of origin, an operation that it has said will be supervised by United Nations agencies, including the International Organization for Migration, and financed by the United States. However, Mr. Chaves has conceded that in some cases arranging deportations could take longer.

Mr. Trump may have praised the contributions of Black Americans on Thursday, but he has spent the weeks since his inauguration eviscerating federal programs aimed at combating inequality in America. He has suggested that efforts spurred by the civil rights movement had made victims out of white people. He blamed a deadly plane crash over the Potomac River on diversity programs in the Federal Aviation Administration.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump tried to show appreciation to the Black community by extolling those he sees as representative of Black American progress.

“Let me ask you,” Mr. Trump said as he began his remarks, “is there anybody like our Tiger?”

Mr. Trump and Mr. Woods are actively engaged in negotiations in search of a lucrative golf merger deal, and the president referred to Mr. Woods repeatedly during his roughly 20-minute address. Mr. Woods wasn’t the only Black athlete to get a shout-out; Mr. Trump also heralded Muhammad Ali and Kobe Bryant.

The president, who made gains with Black voters in 2024, told the crowd of more than 400 guests that “we’re going to work with you.”

During his remarks, Mr. Trump made little reference to issues that have historically plagued the Black community, such as elevated poverty rates, the wage and wealth gap between Black and white Americans, and gun violence. He promised to put statues of Black Americans in a new “National Garden of American Heroes.”

Among those to be honored was Prince Estabrook, an enslaved man and the first Black American to spill blood in the Revolutionary War, along with Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin — and maybe Mr. Woods one day, Mr. Trump said.

The president also used a piece of Black history — the year that the first enslaved Africans arrived in America, which has gained widespread recognition in recent years — to take shots at his political opponents.

“The last administration tried to reduce all of American history to a single year, 1619,” Mr. Trump said. “But under our administration, we honor the indispensable role Black Americans have always played in the immortal cause of another date, 1776.”

The comments highlighted Mr. Trump’s alignment with conservatives who derided a project published by The New York Times called the “1619 Project,” which examined the history of slavery in the United States and explained how America was built on the backs of enslaved people. During his first term, Mr. Trump created the 1776 Commission in response to the project, which he recently resurrected.

Thursday’s event went forward despite rumblings that the White House might choose not to hold a Black History Month celebration this year, as government agencies shuttered such events in light of Mr. Trump’s executive orders.

Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, skirted a question last month about whether the White House planned to mark the occasion. “We will continue to celebrate American history and the contributions that all Americans, regardless of race, religion or creed, have made to our great country,” Ms. Leavitt said.

Mr. Trump’s critics said Thursday’s event was a glaring example of the president’s celebrating and undermining Black history at the same time.

“This White House celebrating Black history is like asking a cow to serve steak,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, which did not receive an invitation to this year’s event.

“He’s holding a celebration at the same time that he’s banning the people from learning about history and civil rights,” Mr. Johnson added. “I’m deeply troubled by the fact that — as the young kids say — he’s playing in our face.”

White House officials have defended Mr. Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which were aimed at countering the impact of discriminatory policies faced by women, Black people, people with disabilities and others in minority groups. The administration says the programs are wasteful and amount to reverse discrimination.

Trump administration officials have argued that the orders rolling back D.E.I. efforts were not intended to suppress Black history but to advance racial progress into a “colorblind” society. The administration has also said it is aligning federal policy with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling prohibiting race-conscious admissions practices in colleges.

Just hours before the Black History Month reception, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff for policy, disparaged D.E.I. policies and said his move against them is among Mr. Trump’s biggest accomplishments in his first month in office.

“This nation has been plagued and crippled by illegal discrimination, diversity, equity and inclusion policies,” Mr. Miller said. “It strangled our economy. It has undermined public safety. It has made every aspect of life more difficult, more painful and less safe.”

Black Republican leaders in attendance included Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Scott Turner, the secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Also in attendance were a number of conservative influencers, including the journalist Sage Steele and the lawyer Leo Terrell. Attendees wore “Make America Great Again” hats of various colors, and one hat was emblazoned with the words “MAGA Black.”

The Rev. Steven Perry, a pastor from Michigan, who supported Mr. Trump after voting for Mr. Biden in 2020, said that he was honored to attend the event. He said that he supported Mr. Trump because he was a leader who followed through on his promises.

“Nobody can take away what we’ve done in this country — it’s evident,” Mr. Perry said of Black Americans. “We’ve got to learn that we got a lot to be proud of, whether somebody acknowledges us or not.”

“We need leaders who help us do what we need to do, not placate our emotions,” he said.

Mr. Trump’s Black Republican supporters have also defended his tactics.

Representative Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida and a stalwart defender of Mr. Trump’s, said in a television interview last month that he took issue with the concept of “equity” that had been the centerpiece of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s agenda, which he said “puts your demographic criteria at the front of the line before your actual qualifications.”

“I think at the end of the day, everybody wants to make sure that people who are getting jobs are qualified to do them,” Mr. Donalds said. “That is most important. But you can’t put just diversity for diversity’s sake ahead of qualifications. It’s not 1972. It’s 2025. We’re in a different phase in the United States of America.”

Dr. Courtney R. Baker, who attended Biden White House events that included a screening of a movie about Emmett Till, said a single event did not exempt Mr. Trump from civil rights work still needed today. She equated his organizing of a reception celebrating Black History Month to a television series that reserves one episode to explore and solve racism, rather than “attending to the realities of the conditions of African American life.”

“This administration is giving a token acknowledgment to Black life but is very shrewdly, I might say deviously, distancing that from the facts on the ground,” said Dr. Baker, a professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that the event was like “rubbing salt in the wound.”

“What he seems to be celebrating is the support he believes he received from Black supporters, so again, it’s about him, not about us,” Mr. Hewitt said. “It’s like a cruel joke.”

The loss of so much federal money, if it were eventually held back, could fundamentally threaten a project that is already struggling with inadequate funding, potentially delaying the installation of electrical systems and the purchasing of trains — both essential big-ticket items.

The project, as it was originally envisioned, would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in two hours and 40 minutes with 220-mile-per-hour trains, among the fastest in the world, at a cost of $33 billion. But Mr. Duffy noted that the costs of the project have escalated threefold since then and that it was failing to achieve the goal.

“The project is not going to happen,” Mr. Duffy said at a news conference at Los Angeles Union Station. “There is no timeline in which you are going to have a high-speed rail that is going to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco.”

That original ambition had already been scaled back by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who committed in 2019 to building a starter line within the Central Valley, from Merced to Bakersfield. But the estimated $22.9 billion cost of even that minisystem has escalated to over $30 billion, leaving a $6.5 billion shortfall in the available funding — even with the $3.1 billion federal grant expected to be received.

A decision by the Trump administration to cancel the grant could strike a crippling blow. It would leave the project to proceed through construction with a roughly $1-billion-per-year revenue stream from the state’s greenhouse gas auction program, barely enough to maintain the historical spending pace of $3 million per day.

Ian Choudri, chief executive of the rail authority, said the project had already been an important source of economic activity and job creation for California, even before the first train runs.

“We welcome this investigation and the opportunity to work with our federal partners,” he said in a statement. “With multiple independent federal and state audits completed, every dollar is accounted for, and we stand by the progress and impact of this project.”

The project continues to have a core of supporters in California, some of whom turned out Thursday at a noisy demonstration that interrupted Mr. Duffy’s news conference.

Yet rail projects in Europe historically have had much broader popular support, said C. William Ibbs, professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who consulted on bullet train projects around the world and who chairs the state-appointed peer review panel for the project.

“We are not sold on rail systems,” he added. “We are sold on cars.”

The lack of broad political support has taken a toll. Mr. Newsom declined to support additional major state funding, even when the state was flush with tens of billions of dollars in surplus revenue. When voters approved a $9 billion bond issue in 2008, it was supposed to provide a third of the project’s funding, while private investors and the federal government were expected to chip in the rest. Since then, however, private investors have shown no interest, either.

And through the years, the project has consistently grown in cost — a result of inflation, changes in plans, higher land acquisition costs, the Covid pandemic and inaccurate cost estimates, all of which happened at a faster pace than new sources of money could be found. As a result, the funding gap has grown, not narrowed.

“This just emphasizes the underlying problem that it is unmanageable without adequate funding,” said Louis S. Thompson, a veteran railroad expert who chaired the state-appointed peer review group until last year. “If federal funding is withdrawn, it will make management of the project all the more difficult.”

A full loss of federal funding, some analysts said, could mean that the project might have to run lower-speed diesel trains on the new tracks. Such a fallback plan was originally proposed as part of grants, issued under the Obama administration, that called for any construction to have “independent utility” if a bullet train system were not realized.

Mr. Duffy’s announcement is not the first warning about problems with the project. Earlier this month, the inspector general for the project, Benjamin Belnap, warned that completion of the Bakersfield-to-Merced line by 2030 or even by 2033 was “unlikely,” and he cautioned that there were other “ongoing risks of delay.”

The harshly worded report by Mr. Belnap renewed longstanding concerns that the optimistic projections by the rail authority were unrealistic, and also added fuel to President Trump’s efforts to further scrutinize the project. Mr. Trump targeted the project in his first term, as well. The Federal Railroad Administration rescinded a $1 billion grant that the Transportation Department under the Obama administration had allocated to the project. California sued to get the money back, and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. restored the money when he entered office.

The California rail authority applied for an additional $8 billion infusion under Mr. Biden’s ambitious national infrastructure program. That money failed to materialize, but the $3.1 billion grant was approved.

Mr. Trump signaled earlier this month that he wanted an investigation of the rail project. Several Republican state lawmakers, who have generally opposed the large funding allocations to high-speed rail, sent him a letter applauding the idea of such an investigation and saying they “stand with you.”

“By all metrics, the High-Speed Rail is a colossal failure,” they wrote. “The $1 billion the state spends on the High-Speed Rail each year would be better spent on protecting lives, homes, and jobs against wildfire and other natural disasters as well as securing water infrastructure for our economy to grow.”

President Trump is delivering remarks at a meeting of the Republican Governors Association in Washington, focusing on familiar themes. He has touted his administration’s efforts to implement tariffs and carry out deportations. He also assailed former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for inflation and rejoining the World Health Organization, and said transgender athletes should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports. He argued his quick start portends well for Republicans in the 2026 midterms.

“They say when you win the presidency, usually the midterms don’t go well,” he said. “I think we’re going to do great.”

Trump is railing against Boeing for taking too long to build new Air Force One planes. “We don’t build like we used to,” he said. “We don’t build too fast. I gave the order out about six years ago. They’re still waiting. Getting a little tired of it.” The Times recently reported about Trump’s growing frustration with the aerospace company.

In her letter on Thursday, Ms. Willis said the House Judiciary Committee should stop trying to interfere in her investigation of Mr. Trump and focus its attention instead on the Justice Department’s handling of the Adams case. Eight federal prosecutors have resigned from the Justice Department in protest over its efforts to dismiss the bribery and corruption charges against the mayor.

At a hearing in New York federal court on Wednesday, a senior Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, suggested that President Trump’s administration was justified in seeking to dismiss charges of corruption against a public official if the official was aiding the administration on other important matters. Mr. Adams has pledged to support Mr. Trump’s moves to crack down on unauthorized immigration, and some have accused him of doing so to persuade the Trump administration to have the corruption charges against him dropped.

Ms. Willis’s case is the last active criminal case against Mr. Trump. After the November election, the Justice Department moved to drop two prosecutions, one for election interference and one for his handling of classified documents. In January, Mr. Trump received an unconditional discharge, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation, after being convicted in a Manhattan fraud trial last year on all 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.

Ms. Willis noted in her letter to Mr. Jordan that the Judiciary Committee had recently sought records from a number of her employees.

“Were you truly interested in ferreting out prosecutorial misconduct and corruption, you would stop wasting taxpayer money on your baseless pursuit of my Office and instead turn your attention to the Trump Administration’s Justice Department,” Ms. Willis wrote.

She also referred to a scathing letter to Mr. Bove written last week by the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, in which she criticized the move to drop the Adams case and offered her resignation, which was accepted.

Ms. Willis wrote that Ms. Sassoon “revealed a corrupt quid pro quo” involving the Justice Department’s decision to drop the charges. “As you are no doubt aware, Ms. Sassoon — along with at least six other senior-level Justice Department officials — resigned rather than carry out the unlawful order. Where is your outrage about this perversion of justice?” Ms. Willis wrote.

The Justice Department has rejected any notion of a quid pro quo. Asked for comment, the department referenced a letter that Mr. Bove had sent earlier this month in which he said that a memorandum from federal prosecutors in New York had “correctly noted” that “the government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams’s assistance on immigration enforcement.”

That assertion was undercut by an appearance Mr. Adams made on Fox News with Mr. Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, in which Mr. Homan said he would make sure Mr. Adams complied with immigration enforcement efforts. “If he doesn’t come through,” Mr. Homan said, “I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on the couch — I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”

A spokesman for Mr. Jordan, Russell Dye, said in a statement on Thursday that “we will continue to conduct oversight to get answers for the American people,” adding that “if the office has nothing to hide, they will cooperate fully with our inquiries.”

While Ms. Willis’s case against Mr. Trump remains open, it is largely moribund. Georgia’s Court of Appeals disqualified Ms. Willis from pursuing the case in December, following revelations of a romantic relationship she had with the lawyer she hired to manage the prosecution. She has appealed the decision to the Georgia Supreme Court, which, like the state’s Court of Appeals, is dominated by Republican-appointed judges.

Hours after a federal judge in Washington ruled that unions representing federal workers did not have standing to challenge mass firings in federal court, other unions representing federal workers released a statement saying that they had filed a very similar lawsuit in the Northern District of California.

In the D.C. case, the judge ruled that unions should take the matter to the agency that handles labor disputes involving federal employees, known as the Federal Labor Relations Authority. If a judge in California gives a conflicting ruling, the cases could end up in a potentially long battle in the federal appeals courts.

Others had indicated that they were considering running even before the announcement from Mr. McConnell, a pivotal player in obstructing major Democratic agenda items and stacking federal courts with conservatives.

Nate Morris, a Kentucky businessman and a Republican, said in a video posted on Feb. 11 that he was “seriously considering” running for either the Senate or for governor of Kentucky. Mr. Morris doubled down on his interest in the Senate in a video on Thursday.

“The candidates that are looking at this race, Andy Barr and Daniel Cameron, have refused to call out Mitch McConnell for the sabotage of President Trump’s agenda,” said Mr. Morris.

Several potential candidates also removed themselves from consideration on Thursday. Two top state Democrats, Gov. Andy Beshear and Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman, will not be in the race, according to Mr. Beshear’s campaign manager and a spokesman for Ms. Coleman. Representative James Comer, a Republican, is not running in 2026 “but is strongly considering a run for governor in 2027,” according to his spokesman, Austin Hacker.

In the state’s last governor’s race, in 2023, Mr. Beshear, the incumbent, defeated Mr. Cameron. Stephen Voss, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky’s Department of Political Science, said that Mr. Cameron’s gubernatorial campaign would give him the most name recognition early on in the race for Mr. McConnell’s seat. But Mr. Voss also noted that Mr. Barr had “good fund-raising capabilities” and that Mr. Morris, who founded Rubicon, a software-based waste management company, would “be able to draw on his own resources to jump-start a campaign.”

On the Democrats’ side, Pamela Stevenson, a state representative, said that she would formally announce her intent to run for the Senate seat in a few weeks. Mr. Voss speculated that other high-ranking Democrats would also step into the race.

“We’re going to have an open Senate race early enough for the full democratic process to play out,” Mr. Voss said, adding that even people who are on the sidelines may enter the race. “Beshear might come under more external pressure from national Democrats.”

Eight federal prosecutors have already resigned from the Justice Department in protest over its efforts to dismiss the bribery and corruption charges against the mayor. One of those who stepped down was Danielle Sassoon, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who said in a letter to Ms. Bondi that the case was well-founded in facts and law.

The administration’s rationale for dropping the case has shifted over time. At first, the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, who has led the bid for dismissal, said the reasons had nothing to do with the legal merits of the case. Instead, he said, it was based on the administration’s desire to have Mr. Adams’s support and assistance in efforts to ramp up deportations of undocumented immigrants.

As the conflict within the Justice Department over the Adams case escalated, senior leaders at the department have argued the case about campaign donations and travel perks was not strong.

Ms. Bondi amplified that argument Thursday.

“It was an incredibly weak case filed to make deportation harder; that’s why they did it,” she said. “They took one of the biggest mayors in the country off the playing field in order to protect their sanctuary city.”

The attorney general and other members of the Trump administration have argued they are trying to depoliticize Justice Department decision-making after what they describe as an anti-conservative bias by the Biden administration in its prosecutorial decisions.

Many current and former Justice Department officials reject those claims as spurious, and argue that the new administration is trying to use law enforcement powers to reward political allies and punish or intimidate their critics.

In her remarks, Ms. Bondi suggested federal prosecutors in New York should forget about the Adams case and focus instead on fighting violent crime. “Ride a subway in New York. It’s not safe,” she declared.

Her remarks came a day after a federal judge held a hearing to consider Mr. Bove’s request to dismiss the indictment against Mr. Adams. The judge has yet to issue a decision.

Afterward, Mr. Bove issued a statement suggesting prosecutors who disagreed with his approach should resign.

At the conference on Thursday, Ms. Bondi argued that the charges against the mayor were so weak she doubted they could win a guilty verdict. “That,” she said, “is the weaponization of government.”