Biden admin swiftly appeals abortion pill ruling as Dems split on going further

The Biden administration has rushed to appeal a Texas judge’s ruling that could suspend the approval of abortion pills nationwide and jeopardize access to the most common method of terminating a pregnancy.

Some Democrats say that’s not enough.

The judge appointed by former President Donald Trump sided with anti-abortion groups who said the FDA’s two-decade old approval of the drug mifepristone is unlawful and should be tossed, but the ruling won’t go into effect for a week to give the administration time to seek an emergency stay from higher courts.

Now, senators, representatives, state officials and advocacy groups are calling on President Joe Biden to defy the U.S. District Court judge and use his executive powers to protect the drugs’ availability even before the case is heard by the conservative-leaning 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“I believe the Food and Drug Administration has the authority to ignore this ruling, which is why I’m again calling on President Biden and the FDA to do just that,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Friday. “The FDA, doctors, and pharmacies can and must go about their jobs like nothing has changed and keep mifepristone accessible to women across America. If they don't, the consequences of banning the most common method of abortion in every single state will be devastating.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) backed Wyden’s call in a CNN interview Friday, arguing that the “deeply partisan and unfounded nature” of the court’s decision undermines its own legitimacy and the White House should “ignore” it.

But the Biden administration is afraid any public defiance of the Friday-night ruling could hurt its position while the case moves through the appeals process.

A person who is advising the White House on legal strategy, granted anonymity to discuss the ongoing litigation, said administration officials think it would be “premature” and “pretty risky” to take the step Wyden is calling for, because it’s possible a higher court would reverse the decision by Texas U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmayrk.

“They’re able to present themselves right now as the adults in the room who care about the rule of law," the person said. "But that posture would come under pressure if they jumped out of the gate and said they wouldn’t abide by the ruling.”

The person added that the White House sees limited benefit in publicly defying the court’s ruling at this juncture for three reasons:

First, ignoring a lower court ruling stripping FDA approval of the pills wouldn’t stop GOP-controlled states from imposing their own restrictions and prosecuting those who violate them. Second, a future Republican president could reverse any decision on enforcement discretion and choose to aggressively prosecute those who sell or prescribe the pills. And third, even in the short term, the president defying the court could leave doctors across the country afraid to dispense the pills.

“It’s a very, very loose Band Aid that wouldn’t actually ensure access to medication abortion,” the person said. “And when you have another option on the table like the appeals process, it’s a pretty risky strategy.”

Additionally, the person said, because the Texas judge put his ruling on hold for one week to give the Biden administration time to appeal, the pills can still be legally prescribed in much of the country, limiting the urgency to take such a drastic action.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told reporters on a call Saturday that while she is sympathetic to Wyden’s position, she doesn’t endorse anything that could jeopardize the administration’s fight to overturn the district court ruling.

“I get the sentiment, because this is a truly infuriating situation,” she said. “This outrageous decision had nothing to do with the facts or science or the law. But the key thing that needs to happen right now is making sure this decision is quickly appealed and reversed in court.”

Murray and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Saturday signaled their intent to use the decision to mobilize their base in the 2024 elections — arguing that flipping the House and passing a law restoring Roe v. Wade is the best path to achieving more permanent protections for the pills than whatever temporary protections the Biden administration could offer through executive actions.

“This battle is going to be fought with public opinion and with our votes at the ballot box, from here until we move forward in 2024,” Murray said.

Schumer suggested Democrats will force votes in Senate in the coming months that “put Republicans on the record” on the issue.

“The American people will see for themselves the stark contrast between Democrats who are relentlessly fighting for women’s rights, to make decisions about their own bodies and MAGA Republicans who will stop at virtually nothing to enact a national abortion ban with no exceptions," Schumer told reporters on Saturday.

Biden himself appeared to endorse this strategy in the hours after the ruling, saying in a statement that while the administration was appealing the case, “The only way to stop those who are committed to taking away women’s rights and freedoms in every state is to elect a Congress who will pass a law restoring Roe versus Wade.”

Even some abortion-rights leaders who have previously criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough to protect access say they support the wait-and-see strategy given the current judicial threats to the pills.

“They do tend to be cautious,” NARAL President Mini Timmaraju told POLITICO. “But with stakes like this, with these courts, they should be. They’re the defendant. We want them to be careful. Also, it has served them well in the past. So I feel confident the administration is doing what they need to do.”

Some legal experts are also warning the administration against defying the decision this early in the process, saying doing so could create a precedent that gives future presidents cover to ignore “future orders that would be more firmly rooted in the law.”

“It would not be advisable for the FDA to disregard a court order even if they believe it’s wrong,” said Joanne Rosen, an attorney and senior lecturer at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “They could appeal. They could re-initiate the approval process of mifepristone all over again to get it back on the market.”

Yet others in the legal community are urging the administration to play hardball, arguing that the FDA was given enforcement discretion by Congress and previous court rulings and the agency should use those to the fullest extent if it is ultimately ordered to rescind its approval of abortion pills.

Those in this camp are pointing to another court ruling Friday night out of Washington State ordering the FDA to maintain the status quo for abortion pills and forbidding the agency from rolling back access in the dozen blue states that brought the challenge. Those clashing decisions, they say, give the Biden administration cover to maintain access to the drugs in defiance of the Texas court if that ruling stands.

“These are not radical,” said David S. Cohen, a professor at the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law. “These are real strategies within the law."

Other Senate Democrats, anticipating this ruling, have called on the Biden administration to “use every legal and regulatory tool in its power” to keep abortion pills on the market. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) recently petitioned the White House to use “any existing authorities, such as enforcement discretion, to allow mifepristone to remain available.

“FDA has previously used its authority to protect patients’ access to treatment and could do so again,” they wrote.

Timmaraju sees the mounting pressure from Democratic officials to ignore the court ruling as meaningful — even if they don’t ultimately goad the Biden administration into sweeping action.

“The senators are doing their jobs — it’s their job to push the White House and agencies like the FDA,” she said. “We need lawmakers from blue states getting out there and calling public attention to this case and raising awareness. For us, the biggest point people need to understand is that there is no state that is safe from these tactics.”

Adam Cancryn contributed reporting. 

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The Ultimate Political Shmear Campaign

When Rep. Dan Goldman launched the congressional bagel caucus shortly upon entering Congress, it was with the lofty goal of using food to bring comity to an institution severely lacking it.

But the New York Democrat wanted to show off too. Goldman’s district encompasses parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and produces what he calls, “the best bagels in the world.” And what does one do with those culinary blessings other than flaunt them?

In early February, a member of his New York team drove down I-95 with 250 bagels and 25 pounds of cream cheese (plain, scallion, walnut, lox schmear and white fish salad) as well as lox from five shops in the district. At 7 a.m. the next morning, aides began what they called a “sophisticated slicing operation,” using two “bagel guillotines” to cut their inventory into halves. In all, an estimated 50 hours of staff time went into preparations at a cost of a “couple grand,” money which came from Goldman’s own wallet. Seeds were, by admission, everywhere. The scent of bagels was invasive. Demand was so intense — hundreds of hungry staffers and roughly 15 lawmakers showed up — that the halved bagels needed to be quartered. The office put out a press release lamenting “supply chain issues.”

The popularity of the event seemed like an affirmation of New York’s status as the ne plus ultra of the bagel. In reality, it said a lot about Washington too. For many years the bagel was just a hackneyed metaphor for the city’s power broker (crusty on the outside, doughy on the inside and lacking a fundamental core). The actual thing was unremarkable at best. Conservatives and liberals alike accepted the reality that to nosh on a decent bagel would require a trip well beyond the beltway.

No more. The bagel has emerged as the unofficial food of official Washington. It’s not just a matter of importing either. D.C. itself has become a burgeoning bagel hub. And it’s happened in quintessentially Washington fashion: through a combination of people entering the industry after burning out at prior jobs and a government flare for meetings and organization.

At the White House, chief of staff Jeff Zients, a former investor in one of D.C.’s new bagel powerhouses, Call Your Mother, has instituted bagel Wednesdays, rekindling the tradition he began earlier when he led Joe Biden’s Covid response team. An estimated 3,500 bagels were brought into the building between February 2021 through April 2022, according to an aide familiar with the coming and goings of the carbohydrate units.

They are dispensed with the type of managerial precision that has come to define a Zients’ operation: five separate boxes of a dozen bagels, each cut in half and accompanied by three spreads. Aides are known to scamper down to the parking lot in the wee hours of the morning when Zients arrives in his car with the loot, each there to bring a box back to its destined location: upper press, the chief of staff’s office, the National Economic Council office, the Domestic Policy Council office, and the Old Executive Office Building.

An even more extensive operation has been going on entirely in secret inside the Democratic National Committee. Since sometime in 2015 or 2016 (no precise origin date is recorded), the committee has had its own bagel Wednesdays. The organizers there have created an internal DNC slack channel — #Bagel-Wednesdays — with 33 members from the research and comms teams participating; a directory of all the bagel shops in the district, calendar reminders for the person whose week it is to bring in the bagels, and a D.C. bagel-specific column on Tweetdeck to monitor pertinent bagel news.

The DNC’s weekly ritual may resemble a bill-tracking app, but there is a feisty fraternalism to it too. A “controversy” erupted, one participant noted, when “someone went a little wild with the varieties.” Rohith Chari, the DNC research associate who is the committee’s official “bagel chair” said they’ve gotten so committed to the ritual that they conduct internal research surveys on bagel and cream cheese preferences, with the results placed into a spreadsheet and distributed to members.

The age of the bagel in D.C. — one can’t call it a “renaissance” since there was nothing of any delight to revive or reimagine — has been aided by the opening of a number of boutique shops that treat the creation and baking process with the seriousness it deserves. At least 21 specifically designated bagel stores now operate inside the district. Only four of them are named “Einstein.” That’s not counting the gourmet bakeries that are producing top notch bagels of their own, like Ellē and Bread Furst.

It has all come as a lovely surprise to those who have lived in the district and assumed they’d doomed themselves to life in a land of unfathomable bagel dullness. Now, even proud New Yorkers are expressing their shock at the impressiveness of the capital’s offerings.

A few weeks after Goldman’s staff drove down massive plastic bags stuffed with New York’s finest, I went to the lawmaker’s office on the Hill carrying four modest paper bags of D.C.’s own options. I wanted to know if Goldman, who had grown up in D.C. during the bagel’s dark age, could set aside his newfound New Yorker’s snobbery and fairly assess his hometown’s transformation.

Sitting around a small round table, he surveyed the products like a sommelier staring at a freshly poured glass of red wine. Between bites, he assessed the doughiness, and how it had to be apparent but not overwhelming. He motioned to a nearby toaster, noting that a warm bagel straight out of the baker’s oven made the contraption unnecessary. He looked over the tops and bottoms to assess whether there was a healthy enough covering of seeds. He described certain schmears as execrable.

“No offense to the people who like butter,” he explained, “but, you know, my children like butter. And at some point, they’re going to graduate and they’re going to realize cream cheese is actually the way you gotta do it.”

As we made our way through the sampling — seeds piling up between tins of cream cheese, paper plates, and a slab of pink, glistening lox between us — he talked about how the bagel, for Jews and others, could provide that rare sense of tradition and community. He revealed his go-to order (light cream cheese, a slice of tomato, some capers and a bit of salt) and conceded that, in recent years, he’d begun eating whole wheat, everything bagels out of the waistline concerns that accompany middle age.

And then, without a prompt for me, he made an admission that, for an up-and-coming New York Democrat, would have previously been so unthinkable, so downright radical, so utterly blasphemous that it may have sparked calls of censure and endangered his reelection campaign.

“I got to tell you,” Goldman said. “I’m impressed with D.C. bagels. It’s a lot better than I remembered growing up. I mean, it’s pretty good.”

‘It Was a Depressing Bagel Landscape’

D.C. has long been a breakfast meeting town without a good breakfast scene. Tacos were non-existent. Bodega egg sandwiches were few and far between. Au Bon Pain was the closest you’d come to a quaint little French bakery down the block. And the well-regarded bagel shops that did exist, like Bethesda Bagels and, for a time, Georgetown Bagelry, were largely connected to the Jewish communities in the suburbs.

Things began to change in the decade after the aughts (whatever that is called: the teens?). And it was Jeremiah Cohen, an upstart baker with culinary roots in the city, who is widely credited with changing it.

A D.C. native, Cohen, 56, is the founder of Bullfrog Bagels, an operation that started as a small batch project in his own home.

His fascination with the bagel dates back to his childhood, when he and his parents, who ran the Tabard Inn, would get in the family’s Volvo 240 on Sunday mornings and drive from River Park to Silver Spring to get bagels in the Maryland burb. It was a 45-minute commute, each way. But there were no better options closer by. It became a ritual that, in his words, “beat out any other breakfast experience.” Ultimately, it was one of the defining throughlines of this life.

When we talked, Cohen spoke of bagels as a source of fandom and regional pride; akin to rooting for the Yankees or the Orioles. D.C.’s absence from those debates — indeed, its status as the Bad News Bears of that analogy — gnawed at him.

When Cohen launched Bullfrog in 2015, there were a handful of good bakers in the city who made bagels, chief among them Mark Furstenberg of Bread Furst. But their client reach was predominantly in the city blocks around them. Bullfrog distributed to others before becoming a pop-up producer and then developing a brick-and-mortar footprint of its own. Months into its debut, it was labeled by Zagat as one of the “most promising independent bagel spots” in the entire country.

Cohen saw his craft as science and art, the bagel as a canvas as much as a collection of calories. It is, after all, both. There are specific ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast, traces of milk or egg whites, malt syrup and other flavors) and cooking techniques (refrigeration, boiling, baking). But at each stage, the baker’s brushstrokes matter: the type of flour chosen, the flavor added, the size of the roll, the girth of it, the time in the refrigerator, the time left boiling, the water it’s boiled in, what kind of oven is used, the amount of seeds added and so on.

It’s amid those variables that a love of bagels can turn mere consumers into obsessives — where people argue about the ways in which the chemicals of the water alter the taste; where they engage in years-long utterly unresolvable disputes about the supremacy of one region’s offerings over another’s (We get it, New York. Calmez-vous, Montreal).

That’s the space where Cohen lives. He judges bagels by the sensory responses they elicit: from the chew (“You can’t make a bagel so chewy that it can cause fatigue in your jaw.”), to the elasticity of the pull, to the crispness (“It shouldn’t crumble. It should snap when you bite it. You can feel it but maybe not hear it.”). The beauty, for him, is in the simple notes. His favorite order is perhaps the simplest one: a bagel, lightly toasted with butter.

As Bullfrog grew, other startups joined it. Call Your Mother opened its flagship location in Park View in 2018, promising not just well-crafted bagels but outside-the-box options and jam-packed breakfast sandwiches. Zients, who was in the private sector at the time, had met with the shop’s co-founder, Andrew Dana, after being connected by a friend of Dana's dad from their summer camp days. He not only invested in the start-up but took an active interest in the product, reportedly sitting down for taste tests.

Zients did not comment for this piece. However, the results speak to the quality of his palate. When Call Your Mother opened, lines snaked around the block. Eater named it one of the 16 best new restaurants in America.

The same year, Pearl’s came on the scene as a catering operation (its actual brick and mortar shop opened in 2020). Its founder, Oliver Cox, like Cohen, entered the industry out of a sense of nostalgia. He had enjoyed a career in journalism (he was Andrea Mitchell’s researcher for three years) and public relations. But like many professionals in D.C., he had only adopted the city as his home. He longed for the bagels of the strip malls in New Jersey, where he grew up. He wanted to import to the beltway the satisfaction he would get from biting into his go to order: an everything bagel, toasted, with pork or Taylor ham, eggs (fried with a runny yolk), American cheese, with salt, pepper and ketchup.

“When you’re hung over and 18, it’s perfect,” Cox told me. “And having it now, it brings you back. That’s what a bagel does. It brings you back.”

Being a bagel merchant is not easy. It is, as Ann Limpert, food critic for The Washingtonian told me, the type of business where “you can taste a shortcut.” Craft matters. It requires early mornings and long hours. It depends on foot traffic, office orders and catering gigs. It demands that people drop their paralyzing panic around carbs and indulge in something fundamentally unhealthy.

But Cohen, Cox and others, made it work. And they did so, in part, by leaning on the notion that D.C.’s dark days in the bagel diaspora were finally ending.

“A lot of people in D.C. who grew up in the tri-state area knew it was a void here,” said Cox. “And they were rooting for us.”

When Covid hit, the district’s bagel shops got a surprising boost. People wanted grab-and-go dining rather than indoor seating. They craved simplicity and a comfort food that matched the lack of pretension that now defined their lives. D.C.’s food scene — long infused by the influences of its foreign immigrants and perpetually underrated — suffered from the pandemic overall. But, in a small way, it also became more complete. The breakfast void was filling.

“I grew up here in D.C. in the `90s and `80s and it was a depressing bagel landscape,” Limpert said. “Right now, it’s having a very unique moment.”

‘We Were Fighting the Battle With White Bread’

There may be no greater authority on the bagel and its place in the D.C. food landscape than Joan Nathan.

A longtime Washington-based food critic, she is to Jewish culinary writing what Robert Frost is to poetry, having written the definitive works on the cuisine. In her seminal book, Jewish Cooking in America, she charted the path of the bagel from ancient Egypt through the 13th century Jewish communities in eastern Europe, who eventually brought the craft to America. In the late 19th century, newly emigrated bakers hawked their goods on New York City’s Lower East Side, displaying a dozen or so on long wooden sticks. But for decades, there was limited desire for bagels beyond the city’s reach.

Things changed in the 1950s and `60s, Nathan noted. The 1951 production of a Broadway comedy, “Bagels and Yox,” helped popularize the bagel. That same year, Family Circle magazine included a recipe for them. And then, not long after, the Lenders, a bagel-making family from New Haven, Connecticut, adopted a few changes to distribution that, in their words, helped “bagelize America.” The first was to put the bagels into polyethylene bags to sell to supermarkets. The second was to adopt freezing technology. Longevity was achieved. A massive new consumer pool was suddenly reachable.

“We were fighting the battle with white bread, which in my day was synonymous with American taste,” Marvin Lender told me. “We were committed to getting out of just the Jewish and eastern Europe clientele.”

But while bagels were no longer just an exotic Jewish food, the Lenders’ innovations had a secondary effect: Most consumers didn’t appreciate the distinction between the mass-produced item and one made in craft stores or by high-end bakers.

D.C. was stuck somewhere in the middle. A government town filled by people who hail from places with good bagels; its citizens were fully aware of how lamentable its own product was. But D.C. is also a place that is often slow to adapt culturally — the very transient nature of it making it hard for non-chain stores to take root.

Eventually, those stores did. And then, the political entities followed, helping further accelerate the bagel’s elevation. That it came in that sequence is no surprise. Politics always operates downstream from culture, frantically trying to catch up.

After word got out about Goldman’s first caucus meeting, Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) approached him to insist that a flour mill in his state was the provider for a lot of bagel shops in Brooklyn. Armstrong wanted an invite to the next gathering. He got one. In early March, the group met again, this time with entry restricted to one lawmaker along with one aide. Afterwards, Goldman posted a photo of the event on Twitter, calling it a “bipartisan success.”

But there was something slightly off about the picture. The bagels, to the trained eye, didn’t appear like the New York variety. The congressman, it turned out, had tried to FedEx them from his district overnight. When they didn’t arrive the next day, there was panic and speculation that a hungry mailman had intercepted the package. But instead of calling off the event, an emergency order was placed to Call Your Mother. It was a quiet affirmation that the Washington bagel had truly arrived.

But no amount of lawmaker comity can obscure the fact that eating a bagel is fundamentally an act of culture not politics, which is why I wanted Nathan to put her stamp on D.C.’s product. When I first reached out to her in late February to tell her I was doing an article about the bagel’s final, thankful emergence, she not only agreed to talk but added a suggestion: Why not do a taste test? And so, on a winter Sunday morning, I picked up three bagels each from Bullfrog, Call Your Mother, and Bread Furst before stopping by her house.

From the start, Nathan made clear she had well-honed opinions on the matter. She did not like everything bagels, she explained, because the onion often overwhelmed the taste buds. She liked her bagel to be light. Her go-to is a bagel that’s fresh out of the oven (she likes a lot of seeds but no salt and would not be caught dead buying the supermarket variety), buttered (good butter, of course, not the mass-produced stuff) with lox.

We spent that morning eating and talking about how the bagel became entwined with Jewish culture and got a footprint in D.C. She credited the bakers, chief among them Furstenberg, whose bagel she liked the best of the three.

But she also spoke of something deeper at play.

The bagel is the ultimate communal food, an ideal fit for a town structured by tribes. Its consumers care about the product enough to create excel spreadsheets and additional slack channels for it. And the product, in turn, binds those consumers together, placing them all on the same, humbling level: hand reaching into the brown crumpled paper bag, pulling out a round piece of dough, cutting it with a floppy white plastic serrated knife, dipping that knife into the cream cheese, wondering fearfully if a colleague had dipped twice.

The bagel is customizable too; the rare food that provides a window into the nature and even upbringing of its consumer. For a city filled with alpha personalities, it’s an opportunity to show off one's identity. For the transplants, it’s also something rarer and more important: a product for which one can grow sentimental.

Nathan recounted a meal she had roughly three years ago with one of the district’s most prominent media personalities (she insisted I not reveal his name). As she glanced across the table, she noticed the person was meticulously slicing cucumbers and placing them gently around the bagel’s circumference. After laying down the full circle, he stopped, and delicately placed a slice of tomato on top. It was only then — with every bite guaranteed to have equally proportioned ingredients — that he dove in.

“It was sort of endearing because you could see he’d been doing this since he was a kid,” Nathan said. “I thought to myself, this is his bagel.”

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Attacks in Israel, West Bank kill 3 in worsening violence

JERUSALEM — Palestinian assailants carried out a pair of attacks on Friday, killing three people and wounding at least six as tensions soared after days of fighting at Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site, officials said. Earlier in the day, retaliatory Israeli airstrikes had hit Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, sparking fears of a broader conflict.

Israeli authorities said an Italian tourist was killed and five other Italian and British citizens were wounded when a car rammed into a group of tourists in Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial hub.

In a separate incident, two British-Israeli women were shot to death near a settlement in the occupied West Bank.

The spasm of violence in Israel and the West Bank heightened fears of an even more intense surge, with the rare convergence of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, the Jewish Passover holiday and Easter currently underway.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was calling up all reserve forces in Israel’s border police, a paramilitary force usually deployed to suppress Palestinian unrest, “to confront the terror attacks.”

The additional border police would be activated Sunday and join other units that have recently been deployed in Jerusalem and Lod, a town in central Israel with a mixed Jewish and Palestinian population.

Israel had unleashed rare airstrikes on Lebanon and bombarded the Gaza Strip on Friday morning, but later in the day there were signs that both sides were trying to keep the border hostilities in check. The fighting subsided after dawn, and midday prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem — a flashpoint for violence in recent days — passed peacefully.

The round of violence erupted after Israeli police raided the mosque earlier in the week, sparking unrest in the contested capital and outrage across the Arab world. Militants fired an unusually large rocket barrage at Israel from southern Lebanon on Thursday — some of the heaviest and most serious cross-border violence since Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militants — as well as from Gaza.

In the Tel Aviv car-ramming late Friday, the alleged attacker rammed his vehicle into a group of civilians near a popular seaside park, police said. Israel’s rescue service said a 30-year-old Italian man was killed, while five other British and Italian tourists — including a 74-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl — were receiving medical treatment for mild to moderate injuries.

Police said they shot and killed the driver of the car and identified him as a 45-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel from the village of Kafr Qassem.

A video circulating on social media showed the car hurtling along a sidewalk for several hundred yards before crashing out of control.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni’s office expressed “closeness to the family of the victim” and “solidarity with the Israel for the vile attack.” She identified the man killed as Alessandro Parini from Rome.

The shooting in the West Bank meanwhile killed the two sisters, who were in their 20s, and seriously wounded their 45-year-old mother near an Israeli settlement in the Jordan Valley, Israeli and British officials said. The family lived in the Efrat settlement, near the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, said Oded Revivi, the settlement’s mayor.

Medics said they dragged the unconscious women from their smashed car, which appeared to have been pushed off the road.

No groups claimed responsibility for either attack. But the Hamas militant group that rules Gaza praised both incidents as retaliation for Israeli raids earlier this week on the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third-holiest site in Islam. On Tuesday, police arrested and beat hundreds of Palestinians there, who responded by hurling rocks and firecrackers at officers.

Friday’s airstrikes on neighboring Lebanon targeted Hamas militant sites, the Israeli military said, accusing the group of firing the nearly three dozen rockets that slammed into open areas and towns in northern Israel on Thursday. The bombardment seemed designed to avoid drawing in Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite group that Israel considers its most immediate threat.

There were no reports of serious casualties from the airstrikes, but several people in the southern Lebanese town of Qalili, including Syrian refugees, said they were lightly wounded.

"I immediately gathered my wife and children and got them out of the house,” said Qalili resident Bilal Suleiman, who was jolted awake by the bombing.

A flock of sheep was killed when the Israeli missiles struck a field near the Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidiyeh, according to an Associated Press photographer. Other airstrikes hit a bridge and a power transformer in nearby Maaliya, and damaged an irrigation system.

In the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military pounded what it said were Hamas weapons production sites and underground tunnels. A children’s hospital in Gaza City was among sites sustaining damage, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

After the retaliatory strikes, Israelis living along the southern border returned home from bomb shelters. Most missiles that managed to cross into Israeli territory hit open areas, but one landed in the town of Sderot, sending shrapnel slicing into a house.

There were no reports of casualties on either side of the southern border.

The Israeli military said everyone wanted to avoid a full-blown conflict. “Quiet will be answered with quiet,” said spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht. A Qatari official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the emirate was mediating.

Even as a fragile calm took hold along the Lebanese and Gaza borders, the West Bank remained volatile. Violence has surged to new heights there in recent months, with Palestinian health officials reporting the start of 2023 to be the most deadly for Palestinians in two decades.

Nearly 90 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank since the start of the year, at least half of them affiliated with militant groups, according to an Associated Press tally. During that time, 17 people have been killed in Palestinian attacks on Israelis — all but one of them civilians.

“It’s just a matter of time, and not much time, until we settle the score,” Netanyahu said as he toured the site of the deadly shooting in the West Bank with Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. “We acted in Lebanon, we acted in Gaza, we beefed up forces in the field.”

Al-Aqsa has long been a nexus of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the skirmishes between Palestinian worshippers and Israeli police at the holy compound this week spiraled into a regional confrontation. The mosque sits on a hilltop sacred to both Muslims and Jews. In 2021, an escalation triggered by clashes there spilled over into an 11-day war between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

Before dawn prayers Friday, chaos erupted at an entrance to the esplanade as Israeli police wielding batons descended on crowds of Palestinian worshippers who chanted slogans praising Hamas as they tried to squeeze into the site. Later, people leaving prayers staged a large protest on the limestone courtyard, raising their fists, shouting against Israel and waving Hamas flags. Israeli police said they forced their way into the compound in response to “masked suspects” who threw rocks toward officers at a gate.

Israeli authorities control access to the area but the compound is administered by Islamic and Jordanian officials.

The unrest comes at a delicate time for Jerusalem’s Old City, which was suffused with religious fervor and teeming with pilgrims from around the world. The Christian faithful retraced the route Jesus is said to have taken for Good Friday and Jews celebrated the weeklong Passover holiday, while Muslims prayed and fasted for Ramadan.

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Prosecutors seek lengthiest Jan. 6 sentence yet for rioter who pinned officer in Capitol doorway

Prosecutors are seeking nearly 16 years in prison for Patrick McCaughey, a Jan. 6 defendant who pinned a police officer in a Capitol doorway amid some of the most chaotic moments of violence that day.

The Justice Department called for the sentence — which would be more than five years longer than the longest sentence handed down in any Jan. 6 case — to reflect what it called McCaughey’s “heinous” conduct, some of the most egregious of any Jan. 6 defendant.

“McCaughey taunted police officers at the West Front bike racks and joined the mob that threw its weight against the beleaguered line of officers guarding the Capitol,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Paschall wrote in the 45-page sentencing memo. “McCaughey used a deadly and dangerous weapon against Officer Hodges, where he spent over two minutes using his body weight to crush the officer in the doorframe.”

McCaughey’s restraint of D.C. Police Officer Daniel Hodges in a Capitol doorway is one of the most recognizable and horrifying images of the violence that day. McCaughey’s restraint of Hodges lasted more than two minutes while other rioters disarmed the officer, removed his gas mask and ignored his screams or help. Images of McCaughey face-to-face with Hodges became a symbol of the brutality of the Jan. 6 riot. It occurred in the Capitol’s lower west terrace tunnel, where many of the most violent confrontations that day took place.

“The defendant’s actions on January 6 show an absolute disregard for the rule of law coupled with a willingness to incite and engage in violence,” Paschall wrote. “The nature and circumstances of this defendant’s crimes weigh heavily towards a significant term of incarceration.”

U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden convicted McCaughey of nine charges — including three counts of assaulting police and obstruction of Congress’ Jan. 6 proceedings — at a bench trial in September 2022. He has characterized McCaughey’s actions as particularly horrific, even compared to other rioters who participated in some of the same violent attacks. But McFadden has also repeatedly rejected prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations, often disagreeing with their calculations and proposed enhancements. Prosecutors indicated in their sentencing memo that they anticipate him disagreeing with them once again.

Still, DOJ’s recommendation is the second-steepest it has made in any Jan. 6 case so far, trailing only the 17.5-year sentence it recommended for Thomas Webster, a former New York Police Department officer who brutally assaulted an officer on the front lines of the riot. Webster is currently serving a 10-year sentence, the longest of any handed down to a Jan. 6 defendant so far, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta. Mehta viewed Webster’s conduct as particularly egregious and also concluded that Webster lied on the stand when he testified about it.

The recommendation for McCaughey surpasses the 15-year sentence the Justice Department recommended for Guy Reffitt, the first Jan. 6 rioter convicted by a jury. Reffitt, a militia member, planned for violence with associates ahead of Jan. 6, carried a firearm and engaged with police in a lengthy standoff that enabled the mob to start amassing at the base of the Capitol. Ultimately, the judge in his case, U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich, sentenced Reffitt to just over seven years in prison.

Prosecutors say McCaughey, like Webster, was dishonest when he testified in his own trial last year. In addition to his lack of candor on the stand, prosecutors say McCaughey’s recommended sentence was influenced by the brutality of his attack against Hodges and a second officer, Henry Foulds — who McCaughey struck with a riot shield as the officer tried to close the doors to the tunnel.

McCaughey, for his part, is arguing for a sentence of a year in prison, contending that his crimes on Jan. 6 were an “aberration” in an otherwise law-abiding life.

“Although his conduct is indeed serious, it represents the only legal transgression this hard-working person has ever committed,” his attorney, Dennis Boyle wrote in a 25-page sentencing memo. “It is also significant to note that his actions were not motivated by any desire for personal financial gain or any other type of benefit. Rather, his actions, which he himself admits were reprehensible, were motivated by a misunderstanding as to the facts surrounding the 2020 election.”

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Texas judge halts FDA approval of abortion pill

A Texas federal judge ruled Friday to suspend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone — one of two drugs used together to cause an abortion — virtually banning the sale of the pills across the country.

The decision, however, gives the Biden administration a week to appeal, meaning the hundreds of thousands of patients who use the medication both for abortions and treating miscarriages will not be immediately impacted.

The pills, which the FDA approved for use in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy more than two decades ago, recently became the most common method of abortion in the United States, and a way many people have circumvented state bans since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June.

Both abortion-rights supporters and opponents have focused intensely on the pills in recent months — leading to clashes in state legislatures, regulatory agencies, and the courts.

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Leaked military documents on Ukraine battlefield operations circulated as early as March

A tranche of leaked documents that detail plans about Ukraine’s spring military offensive circulated online as early as March — a month earlier than previously reported, according to researchers with Bellingcat and a review of social media postings.

The batch includes more pages than originally known and also outlines sensitive information about other global hotspots.

The Ukraine-specific documents, photographed and distributed on myriad social media sites, outline everything from Ukraine’s readiness and training capabilities to death tolls on the battlefield. They date from the end of February to the end of March — around the same time as senior American generals hosted the Ukrainian military at a U.S. base in Germany to wargame the spring operation.

The materials that circulated in early March were uploaded on a Discord, an encrypted messaging app. They appear to be photos of slide deck printouts that were folded up and then smoothed out again. They have since been posted on other social media websites, including Twitter and Telegram.

It’s unclear who originally obtained the documents, who leaked them and the extent to which they’ve been altered. It’s also possible an even earlier version exists.

A senior administration official, granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive intelligence matter, said President Joe Biden's team is "concerned" by the large document leak. "This could be a Russian disinformation operation,” the official continued, citing the manipulations to the documents. "Russia has a history of manipulating information for disinformation purposes.” The official wouldn't detail when the administration first became aware of the leak.

There are discrepancies between the documents posted in March and those circulated this month, suggesting the earlier tranche could be the original versions — or at least closer to it.

The leak is one of the most high-profile breaches of military intelligence since the Russian invasion in 2022 and comes at a time when Ukraine is preparing to launch the spring offensive. The documents "represent a significant breach in security, which could compromise U.S. and NATO support for Ukraine," said Mick Mulroy, a former DoD official and CIA officer.

The images that appeared online earlier this week show slides that were produced by the Joint Staff, but which have been heavily doctored to show inaccurate information, according to a second senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

In reviewing the batch of documents that circulated on Discord and those that appeared in April on sites such as Telegram, Twitter and 4chan, POLITICO found that at least one section had been changed — the death tolls. The number of Ukrainian deaths is significantly higher in the later version.

However, there are irregularities in both the March and April versions. Not all of the documents are dated. One is dated as late as March 23 — about 20 days after someone posted them on Discord. Other pages are missing security markers and have sections replaced by white space.

The documents, which are at least five weeks old, are of limited value to Moscow as they show the conflict as a snapshot in time. Still, they may help Russian intelligence planners with establishing the expected burn rate for Ukrainian supplies, the second senior official said.

The Department of Defense is investigating the leak, which the New York Times first reported, the Pentagon said Thursday.

“We are aware of the reports of social media posts, and the department is reviewing the matter,” said DoD spokesperson Sabrina Singh. The Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

The early reaction from Capitol Hill has been fierce. “I’d fire anyone who leaks without authorization when they’re identified,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy and member of the House Armed Services Committee.

“I’m troubled by the potential leak and possible disinformation related to the documents,” said Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I look forward to hearing from the Department of Defense on steps they’re taking to investigate and address any wrongdoing.”

Other pages included in the March tranche include information about various countries, Jordan, Palestine and China.

Some of the Ukraine-related documents, marked “SECRET” and dated February and March, show American and NATO plans for training and arming Ukrainian forces ahead of a planned counteroffensive this spring.

One slide includes detailed plans for equipment Western countries will deliver to Ukraine this spring, such as the number of tanks and armored vehicles each nation is sending and the estimated date of arrival. It also shows the status of training programs by different NATO countries.

One document outlines what Western equipment Ukrainian brigades are receiving and when they’ll be trained. If that information is correct, it could provide useful intelligence to Moscow about new capabilities entering the battlefield this spring and summer. It is also a fascinating look into the international grab-bag of equipment the rapidly equipped Ukrainian army now fields.

The 82nd brigade, for example, looks to be an armored powerhouse. It will boast about 150 armored infantry carriers, including 90 U.S.-Stryker vehicles, 40 German-produced Marders, 24 U.S.-made M113 infantry carriers and 14 British Challenger tanks, giving the unit a powerful punch, according to the documents. The unit is currently being trained as the equipment continues to arrive.

Similarly, the 33rd brigade will have 32 Leopard tanks from Germany, Canada and Poland, alongside 90 American-made MRAP troop carriers. All the vehicles were slated to arrive for training in March and April, according to the documents.

Another slide shows the Joint Staff’s daily update of the conflict, including planned operations of U.S. forces in the surrounding area such as the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush and several submarines, the locations of which are rarely, if ever, publicized.

Others, marked “TOP SECRET,” show the U.S. military’s assessment of Russian and Ukrainian troop movements in key battlegrounds, including Bakhmut, Kharkiv and the Donetsk, on March 1.

Both the March and April tranches show updates from the battlefield from February that includes an allegation that “agents” of Ukraine attacked a Russian aircraft based in Belarus. The Ukrainian government has previously denied those claims. A spokesperson for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the incident.

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Bennie Thompson: ‘I chose Liz Cheney over party’

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the man who for nearly 18 months anchored the House investigation into the events that led to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, says he sees parallels between the attacks on his committee’s work and the skepticism levied at the Manhattan district attorney.

Alvin Bragg, a first term district attorney, made history earlier in the week when he announced 34-felony counts against former President Donald Trump. It is the first time in the nation’s history a former president has been criminally charged. At his arraignment in New York on Tuesday, Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges.

Soon after those charging documents were made public, critics, including those who normally would be expected to support Bragg’s case, bemoaned the legal theories he is employing in pursuit of a conviction. As POLITICO highlighted earlier this week, Bragg’s case, which stems from hush money payments to silence a porn star from speaking publicly about an alleged affair, appeared to embolden Trump’s most ardent defenders.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Thursday subpoenaed a former prosecutor who worked in the Manhattan DA’s office — a move Bragg characterized as an “attempt to undermine an active investigation” and “an unprecedented campaign of harassment and intimidation.”

None of this is a surprise to Thompson, the ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee.

“I expect nothing less from my colleagues on the other side,” Thompson said during an exclusive interview with POLITICO for The Recast Power List 2023.

“I've been in Congress almost 30 years and I've never seen a congressional committee attack a state official who's doing his job. Basically crossing the line – from Bennie Thompson's standpoint – intimidating an official not to do his job.”

In an 845-page report, Thompson’s own committee concluded at the end of last year that there is enough evidence for the Department of Justice to convict the former president on charges including obstruction of an official proceeding and assisting and providing aid and comfort to an insurrection.

In the interview, Thompson weighed in on the allegations that the myriad investigations Trump is at the center of — including two headed by special counsel Jack Smith at the DOJ and one by the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney — are politically motivated. He also talked about why he opened the Jan. 6 hearings by connecting that attack to America’s long history of racism and slavery and explains the flak he received for picking former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as the committee’s vice chair.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Booker: I want to jump into our conversation starting with what happened in Manhattan (this week) seeing the former president into a Manhattan courthouse and be charged with 34 felony counts in connection to a hush money payment to silence a porn star. I want to get your overall thoughts about what this says about where we are in our quest to uphold American democracy.

Rep. Thompson: Well, I think the best phrase that we hear from some circles is: It proves that no one is above the law. In America, you can be President of the United States, but you are tasked with the responsibility of the rule of law, and when you don't do that, you're subject to the penalties and other things that are associated with it.

So I allow that process to work itself [out]. Clearly, a group of citizens, in the form of a grand jury, heard evidence and ultimately made a decision to come forth with indictments. Now we'll look at our system of justice in this country to see if, in fact, Donald Trump will be proven guilty or innocent.

Booker: I just want to note that the former president pleaded not guilty to all the charges. Now, obviously, the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, has to convince a jury that Mr. Trump committed these alleged crimes. But, as someone who worked on the January 6th committee, are these legal proceedings of a former president, someone who is a leading candidate on the GOP side, good for American politics? You’ve talked about nobody's above the law, but certainly there are allegations being levied on the right that all of these investigations, these legal probes, are politically motivated.

Rep. Thompson: Well, I expect nothing less from my colleagues on the other side.

Donald Trump is the titular head of the [Republican] Party. They have a fundamental right to defend that individual, and that's what they're doing. My concern is, in defense of it, they're attacking the rule of law, and the rule of law in this country is clear. We have separation of powers in our Constitution.

I've been in Congress almost 30 years and I've never seen a congressional committee attack a state official who's doing his job. Basically crossing the line — from Bennie Thompson's standpoint — intimidating an official not to do his job.

I think that's unfortunate.

The other thing associated with the comment is my work on January 6th.

Some of the conversation and vitriol that we're hearing, we heard before January 6th. It's very dangerous language. So before January 6th, people would say, "Oh, this would never happen in the greatest democracy on Earth."

Well, it did.

And it happened because there were certain forces at work. Those forces were orchestrated — based on the work of our committee — by, at that time, the President of the United States and some other individuals.

I would think that our committee made the case. We utilized primarily people who worked in the administration, people who identified with the party of the administration, but they chose patriotism and democracy over party. I thank them for that.

But even with that, some of the individuals who are talking now are very critical of people in their own party for coming forth. This is our great democracy, we have an opportunity to speak our opinion, but sometimes we have to be cautious of what we say because others are listening, others are watching, and they, in many instances, interpret it a different way.

Booker: Well, let me just follow up on this one point here. A CNN poll out this week indicated that 60 percent of those surveyed said they approved of the Trump indictment.

But when broken down by race, 75 percent of those who identify as a person of color approved of the indictment, versus just 51 percent of white respondents who said they approved of this indictment.

Why do you think there's such a wide gulf in how white Americans and how people of color view this indictment of the former president?

Rep. Thompson: Well, one of the things I've experienced over my political career is there's a fundamental belief by the majority of African Americans that they actually believe in our system of government. They believe in the rule of law. So whatever it is that they have to do to demonstrate it, they do it on a regular basis.

When elections go wrong, the majority of the Black people who lose elections don't act like Donald Trump and his people. They basically will go to court. If they lose, then they'll get their act together and come back next election.

Donald Trump has taken losing an election to the worst level possible, and that worst level is deny, deny, deny and, ultimately, … go into a system of violence.

I take myself, for instance. I've been in elective office for quite a while. When I first started, we had problems registering people to vote; we had problems having people go in polling places to help, even though it was the law. But at no point did we ever think about taking the law into our own hands. We made the law work based on what it said. And so I see that attitude right now in that CNN poll.

People of color really want this system of government to work for all the people. And so they will, by and large, defend it. But I see a lot of white Americans who are somehow intimidated because of this growing minority, and the language that Donald Trump is saying, and his supporters, that we have to “make America great again.”

Some of those code words are really creating havoc in the white community because of the gun laws that are being passed around the country. The underlying element in those gun laws is race. It's not Second Amendment. It's all about how we have to defend our communities, why we have to defend our schools, even though, by and large, those rationales for the defense are hollow.

And so I'm comfortable in saying, even in the south, racial bloc voting occurs more among whites than it does Blacks. Black people in the South have voted, historically, at a greater percentage for white candidates than white voters have voted for Black candidates. So we have made some of that adjustment, and I think that poll reflects the maturing of the attitudes in the Black community toward defending the system.

Booker: At The Recast, we focus on the intersection of race and identity and how it's shaping American politics. Part of the reason why you were selected by a committee of my colleagues to be on this year's Power List is how you placed race right at the center of the January 6th investigation.

In your opening remarks in the first committee hearing ... I'm going to read your quote back to you just to get your reaction to it because it was so powerful, it stuck out to me.

You said: "I'm from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. I'm reminded of that dark history today as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021."

Please break down why you wanted to start the conversation about the investigations into the attack on the Capitol with race.

Rep. Thompson: Well, I think, as a country, we have to continue to reflect on our history.

Even though we are the greatest country in the world, there have been some issues associated with our growth and maturity that we can't overlook. So to remind people of that history is important.

I think it was symbolic that an African American chaired the January 6th Committee, [whose] ancestors were brought to this country in the belly of ships, who for a number of years, toiled, building public courthouses and city halls all over this country for free, even our United States Capitol.

What happened on January 6th was that sole reminder that, even though we are the greatest country in the world, we have to maintain vigilance in keeping it … otherwise, the potential for what occurred on January 6th could very well happen again.

So I wanted to frame it [in that context and] I chose Liz Cheney as my vice chair. I didn't have to. I could have picked anyone, but I think it was for the country. I chose Liz Cheney over party. And some of us, my friends, they took issue with it

Booker: Really?

Rep. Thompson: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

But it was, more or less, "Why did you do it? You were in charge. You could have done a lot of things," and I said, "Well, this was more than party. This was country."

And while my country has not always treated Bennie Thompson or my ancestors properly, I think there are some times you have to look beyond party and race to get to the next level, and so I've tried to do that.

But I can still be truthful in the process. I don't have to gloss over it, just be straightforward, and so my opening comments, truthful, straightforward. Some people might not [have understood] the place of it, but you have to set the tone for the seriousness of your hearing, and I thought that went a long ways toward establishing the tone.

Booker: I wanted to ask a couple of questions since you are home in your district right now in the Jackson area. One, before the end of the year, Congress voted on an omnibus, allocating about $600 million to address the Jackson water crisis.

I'd like to get an update on that from you about how that is progressing. And last week, President Biden was in your state, touring the devastation from natural disasters. If you could, give me a brief update about how the recovery efforts are going in that regard.

Rep. Thompson: As most of you know, the Jackson water crisis was an ultimate culmination of a flooding event on our water system that really knocked out everything.

But, as we started to look at it, there was a history of lack of state support toward the largest publicly-owned water system in the state. Part of that was associated with the fact that Jackson had become a majority African American city. And so, over time, that neglect led to a system that could no longer be maintained.

The flood that occurred on that system, however, allowed us an opportunity to call on the federal government to help. We had a disaster declaration declared, and, ultimately, we looked at the omnibus disaster package. That provided money for wildfires in the West and flooding in the West also, as an opportunity to do the same thing for Jackson, Mississippi. And that's what we did.

The initial installment is 600 million. Not enough. It'll take several years to spend the money, but the system, pardon the pun, was on life support, so we’re working through it. But, in order to work through it, we established a third-party manager who will run that system, and we are in the process of going through that and I thank everybody for their support.

Unfortunately, 10 days ago, a tornado went through five counties in my district. We lost 13 in the city of Rolling Fork, Mississippi. We're struggling. Those cities and counties, under the best of circumstances, were vulnerable. There's no public transportation. In two of the counties, there's no hospital. So we're challenged in that respect, but our friends all over the country have stepped up. But there are still some vestiges of inequity.

One is, the white kids attend an all-white segregated academy. Believe it or not, some of the resources for the community were sent to that all-white segregated academy where Black folk don't go, and so we had to turn that around.

The Biden administration has talked about equity and making sure that the response to whatever it is, education, housing, agriculture, is looked at through a colorblind lens. We fixed that.

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