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Natalie Harp worked at White House without security clearance for nearly a year – report
Natalie Harp, special assistant to Donald Trump, continues to be the focus of media attention Thursday after an MS Now report revealed that she had worked at the White House for nearly a year without obtaining a security clearance.
Harp, a former One America News Network show host, has emerged as a key gatekeeper to the president. Her presence with Trump when the president left Air Force One as a decoy while sneaking on to another plane in a service cart – even as senior officials remained behind – drew attention.
Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator from Georgia, amplified that attention with comments at a rally Sunday in Atlanta. Speaking of Trump, Ossoff said: “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job; he wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
A clip of his commentary went viral on social media, drawing attacks from the president’s defenders.
White House communications director Steven Cheung posted in reply on X: “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” while White House spokesman Davis Ingle posted, “Jon Ossoff is a cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama. Nobody gives a shit what this lightweight loser says.”
Ossoff marveled at the reaction to his observations in an interview Wednesday with Laurence O’Donnell on MS Now. “It’s been amazing to watch this White House melt down over this all week,” Ossoff said. “These White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer with immense power in positions of public trust. And whether it’s Natalie Harp printing out Donald Trump’s daily dose of delusion and flattery, or Peter Navarro steering taxpayer-funded loans to Trump family investments, or Pete Hegseth deluding the president daily into deepening this quagmire in the Middle East, no one cares about their feelings.”
The pile on continues: Rosie O’Donnell, a longstanding Trump antagonist filling in Wednesday night for Jimmy Kimmel, picked at the topic.
“That’s all I’m going to say about you tonight, sweetheart,” O’Donnell said of Trump. ”You got to realize it’s time to hang up your wig and let Natalie tuck you in. Time to go nighty-night!”
Key events
“The greatest investment America can make is not in technology, infrastructure or capital markets,” she says. “It’s our children.”
Melania Trump addresses questions around absence: ‘I heard you missed me. Here I am’
Aaand, scratch that. The Trumps have arrived early.
“Good afternoon. I heard you missed me. Here I am,” says Melania Trump, to laughs from the audience.
Melania and Donald Trump to make fostering initiative announcement in Rose Garden
Melania and Donald Trump are due to make an announcement in the White House Rose Garden at 4pm ET related to the administration’s Fostering the Future Together initiative.
According to the New York Post, Melania will be announcing a new round of scholarships for foster children in partnership with Indycar, the US auto racing sanctioning body.
So far, the first lady has kept an even lower profile than during her husband’s first term, making only 38 public appearances this year. The last one was at the World Cup final, over a month ago.
Per my colleague Arwa Mahdawi, “NBC reported on Monday that she’s done about half as many public events as she did at this point in Trump’s first term. A senior adviser told the outlet she ‘prioritises results over appearances’.
“Her highest-profile public appearance this year was when she held a surprise press conference telling everyone not to speculate about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. This had the predictable result of getting everyone to speculate about her relationship with the dead sex offender.
“Melania [also] starred in an eponymous documentary bankrolled by Amazon that hit theatres at the beginning of the year. Ted Hope, a former Amazon employee, told the New York Times that the $35m in promotion and $40m in rights meant it had to ‘be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing’.”
The Trump administration plans to bar Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas from traveling to New York next month to speak before the UN general assembly for the second year running, the Times of Israel reports citing a US official.
Last August, the US state department denied and revoked visas from members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the PA in advance of the annual meeting, including Abbas. The state department alleged at the time that the PA was “not complying with their commitments, and … undermining the prospects for peace”. Abbas in the end addressed the conference virtually.
It came amid a push from France and Saudi Arabia to recognize the state of Palestine and to promote a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which angered Israel.
DNC sues DOJ over unanswered FOIA requests regarding ballot seizures
The Democratic National Committee has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration today “over its failure to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking records about any plans to seize ballots in the midterm elections”.
“Following the seizure of archived ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, the DNC sent requests for records to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice regarding seizure of ballots, voting machines, and other voting system components,” the DNC said in a press release. “Nearly five months later, the DNC has not received a single responsive document, in clear violation of FOIA. This lawsuit comes as Trump is publicly musing about declaring an emergency to attempt to take over the midterm elections.
“The DNC previously sued the Trump administration for refusing to provide records regarding any plans to deploy federal agents or troops to polling places, drop boxes, and election offices in upcoming elections and won a court order forcing the administration to produce thousands of pages.
“The DNC filed the FOIA requests to inform the public and prepare for any legal actions needed to protect Americans’ right to vote and to protect the security, transparency, and integrity of elections across the country. The DNC will continue holding the administration accountable and demanding they not subvert or undermine the will of the voters.”
DNC chair Ken Martin said in a statement:
Donald Trump is historically unpopular and doing everything he can to subvert our elections this November – which is why we’re suing his administration once again. In our ongoing fight to protect free and fair elections, the DNC is holding Trump and his cronies accountable for their continued threats to our democracy. Whether in court or at the ballot box, we will stand with voters and defend them from Trump’s attempts to suppress their voices.
‘Maybe, maybe not’: Michael Cohen declines to say if he’ll use his Trump interview to seek a pardon
Donald Trump has given a radio interview to none other than Michael Cohen, his former longtime personal fixer turned fierce critic, after an apparent reconciliation set the stage for their first public conversation in eight years.
Their exchange, recorded earlier today and due to be broadcast on 77WABC at 6pm ET, amounts to an extraordinary twist in the pair’s relationship.
Cohen once had such a tight relationship with Trump that he described himself back in the day as his “attack dog with a law license”, but later became the star witness in Trump’s 2024 criminal trial over his hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in an effort to interfere with the 2016 election.
In 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison on charges related to hush-money payments on Trump’s behalf to help conceal the affair with Daniels, including campaign finance violations, tax evasion and bank fraud, as well as lying to Congress. He spent more than a year behind bars and the rest of his sentence in home confinement. He was also disbarred in New York. He later started a podcast and wrote books devoted to fierce criticism of Trump.
Cohen’s tune changed shortly after Trump returned to office, stating publicly in January last year that he felt “pressured and coerced” by federal prosecutors during the hush-money trial. Now, Trump will appear on the New York City radio show that Cohen began hosting last month.
Asked last night by Politico if during the phone interview he and the president would discuss presidential clemency for the conviction that landed Cohen a three-year prison sentence, Cohen replied:
We’ll see. Will I make that request down the road? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.
Scott Jennings reportedly pushing for White House press secretary role
And speaking of Karoline Leavitt, Scott Jennings is pushing to replace her as White House press secretary when she departs at the end of the month, Politico reported this morning.
Per Politico’s Dasha Burns: “After clips of Jennings defending Natalie Harp made their way around the WH – including some he sent to senior staffers himself – he reached out to schedule a private meeting with [White House chief of staff] Susie Wiles over the weekend, a person close to the WH told me.
“No decision was made and no offer extended. The process to replace Leavitt remains slow-moving.”
CNN is also reporting that Jennings has emerged as an early frontrunner to take over in the role – with the caveat that its sources “stressed that the process is far from complete” – and met Wiles recently at Mastro’s Steakhouse in Washington DC at the request of the White House.
Multiple staffers told CNN they believe Jennings has her backing, but others pushed back on that claim and said Wiles plans to meet several other potential contenders before making any decisions.
Jennings, CNN’s most prominent pro-Trump commentator and longtime conservative strategist, previously served in the George W Bush administration and an adviser to GOP senator Mitch McConnell.
Asked if he wants the job, Jennings told Politico: “I don’t have anything to say about that.”
Further to that, Trump’s outgoing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not issue a flat-out denial of its report that Natalie Harp resisted applying for security clearance for months before eventually relenting after pressure from White House staff.
When asked for comment by MS NOW, Leavitt said: “Natalie Harp has a security clearance like everyone else, and she is a loyal and hardworking member of President Trump’s team.”
Allegations over Natalie Harp’s lack of security clearance ‘deadly serious’ if true, says former senior adviser to Obama
David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, has expressed concern over the Natalie Harp affair, responding to reports (which the Guardian has not verified) that she resisted applying for security clearance on X:
If this story is true, and the person closest to the @POTUS and his thinking on a daily basis has no security clearance and refuses to submit to the process of getting it, it’s a deadly serious issue.
MS NOW reported that Harp, Donald Trump’s closest aide, declined several times over more than a year to apply for the routine security clearance normally obtained by West Wing staffers to work at the White House, citing two people familiar with the matter.
The people did not know Harp’s reasons for declining to complete the process. “After concerns mounted among the White House counsel’s office and security officials, the president himself intervened, and Harp in recent months filled out the forms to launch a formal federal background investigation and received the clearance,” MS NOW reported.
The state department has declared that Min Zin, an American scholar arrested in China during an academic trip is being wrongfully detained.
The announcement “follows an extensive review of the circumstances surrounding his 3 June detention in Yunnan, China, where Zin had traveled to attend an academic conference at the invitation of the Chinese government,” the state department release says. “There are now two wrongfully detained U.S. citizens in China: Mr. Zin and Dr. Youlin Chen.”
The Chinese government arrested Zin, a US scholar who writes about Myanmar and Chinese foreign policy in June for “espionage activities.” Zin had visited China many times before without incident, according to Burmese activists. Zin was a student activist in Myanmar during the pro-democracy movement in 1988. He later sought asylum in the US.
His arrest follows that of Youlin Chen, a seismologist arrested in 2024 by the Chinese government. Chen’s research includes how to detect underground nuclear tests using seismological data. Advocates for his freedom believe the Chinese government may be trying to determine the extent of America’s ability to detect an underground nuclear test.
The Democratic National Committee has narrowed its finalist cities to host the 2028 Democratic National Convention to Boston, Denver, and Philadelphia. The convention is scheduled to take place from 7-10 August 2028, with a final city selection expected later in the year.
Chicago and Atlanta are a little salty about that.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens expressed some irritation at hearing about the finalist selection from the news. He blasted the DNC in a letter Thursday, Fox 5 Atlanta reported.
“For the DNC to not even include Atlanta in the shortlist means that the DNC does not consider Atlanta or Georgia relevant to the past, present, or future of the Democratic Party,” Dickens said, adding, “They are afraid to leave their comfort zone and blind to the fact that the South is the answer. They are abandoning Atlanta, abandoning the South, and once again abandoning Black voters.”
Emily Soong, spokesperson for the Chicago 2028 Bid Committee, said that “Chicago is proud to have hosted the best Democratic National Convention in history, and we were honored to raise our hand once again to be considered for 2028. We are deeply committed to the success of the next convention, and we are all-in to support whichever host city is selected in this process.”
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