‘The Elite’s Destruction of Civic Customs Is Complete’

On Tuesday afternoon, against the blue-sky backdrop of one of the first spring-like days in New York, Donald Trump’s eight-car motorcade arrived at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He was there to turn himself in ahead of his arraignment on criminal charges related to hush money he paid to an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, during the 2016 campaign. His indictment marks the first time a former — and certainly the first time a former and possibly future — president has been charged with criminal conduct.

After almost a decade of Trump’s rewriting most of the rules in politics, his indictment could blow up another norm: The perception of the legal system’s independence from politics. Conservatives and Republicans have argued that Trump’s prosecution was politically motivated, coming from a liberal DA who campaigned on holding Trump accountable. (Even some liberal analysts have pointed to the flimsiness of the 34 felony counts Trump has been charged with.) Meanwhile, most liberals and Democrats argue that it’s a triumph of law and order over a president who has long evaded consequences for his actions.

Will this prosecution change politics as we know it?

POLITICO Magazine reached out to a group of the sharpest legal and political minds to get their take on how the charges leveled at Trump could usher in a new era of politics, with consequences that will reverberate long after Trump’s trial, long after the 2024 campaign and long after Trump is out of office — or, as the case may be, out of prison.

The last time everyone had it out for Trump like this, he became president.

Sarah Isgur was Justice Department spokeswoman during the Trump administration and is the host of the legal podcast Advisory Opinions for the Dispatch. She is a POLITICO Magazine contributing writer. 

In the United States, no citizen is privileged above any other. The problem for Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, therefore, is not to show that Donald Trump was indicted despite being a former president but to prove that Trump wasn't indicted because he was the former president. Trump isn’t above any law, no matter how relatively small, but he also shouldn’t be below basic notions of fairness. Even after Bragg unveiled the 34-count indictment and 13-page statement of facts, it is still not clear what the legal theory of this case is. And that is a problem.

The DA has brought a charge that is on shaky legal ground — and in all the explanations he provided this week, he has not specified the elements he intends to prove at trial and has left open questions about what evidence he has to prove basic parts of his case. Despite some wishful thinking I’ve seen from some folks online, I can tell you these are not signs of strength from a prosecutor.

This gets to the political ramifications of these charges. By bringing a case that is so open to criticism from lawyers across the political spectrum, Bragg has left himself open to criticism that he has brought charges against Trump because Trump is a politically popular target with his largely liberal constituents. During his 2021 campaign, Bragg emphasized the importance of the Trump investigation and of electing someone who could hold Trump accountable.

The predictable result is that Republicans — both voters and Trump’s potential rivals for the nomination — have responded to these perceived political attacks by circling their wagons around Trump despite the fact that his alleged conduct, paying off an adult film actress, would seem to put him at odds with most social conservatives. Meanwhile, Democrats are quietly rooting for Trump to be the Republican nominee because they believe he is the easier candidate to defeat in a general election.

And if all that sounds eerily familiar, it’s because it is. Last time, it resulted in Trump being elected as the 45th president of the United States.

“Local Republican prosecutors may explore whether they, too, can criminally pursue national political leaders from the opposing party.”

Ankush Khardori, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, is a POLITICO Magazine contributing writer.

I think the situation surrounding the prosecution is too unstable and unprecedented to venture any firm predictions for how it might affect politics in the short term, including the 2024 election. Trump and his supporters have been touting the fact that many of his supporters are rallying around him, but that gives us only a partial and potentially very misleading picture of the political impact across the entire U.S. voter base. It is useful to recall that during his presidency, Trump would tout the fact that he had high favorability numbers among self-identified Republicans even though national polling consistently showed that he was well underwater with voters across the country, and of course, he went on to easily lose to Joe Biden in 2020.

I do not have a crystal ball, but I find it hard to believe that in the aggregate it could help a national presidential candidate in this country to be under indictment. Indeed, at the moment, Democratic voters — at least judging by my inbox! — appear just as energized by the indictment and just as uninterested in questions about the strength or propriety — or even the underlying facts — of the case against Trump. Many of them believe (not unreasonably) that the man is a uniquely dangerous political figure, and after years of many liberal legal pundits telling the public that Trump could easily be put in prison if only some prosecutor had the courage to do it (which has always been far too simple-minded), they seem to believe that the prosecution is justified in large part because it could help prevent Trump from retaking office. They may ultimately be right about that.

Over the long term — and here I am talking about years, if not decades — I expect local Republican prosecutors may explore whether they, too, can criminally pursue national political leaders from the opposing party, even if the case appears literally unprecedented. Needless to say, we do not know whether Trump will be charged by the Justice Department in the ongoing investigation into January 6 and the classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago, but if that happens, that could dissipate the short- and long-term political effects of the Manhattan DA’s case.

It could also re-focus the country’s attention on where I think it should have been immediately after Biden came into office — ensuring that our presidents are subject to swift and robust legal accountability from our only nationally representative prosecutorial body. Such an outcome in that case, I believe, is more likely to secure broad-based public and political support, more likely to demonstrate strong and compelling legal cases and more likely to obtain significant sanctions upon a conviction, like imprisonment.

“In the coming months, we shall see pro-Trump forces using the same corrosive tactics — or lose utterly.”

Mark Bauerlein is an English professor emeritus at Emory University and a senior editor at First Things.

Anyone who spends a single second treating this case as a legal action is either wasting his breath or participating in the program. At the upper levels, our juridical condition changed forever on November 9, 2016, when the unexpected, the impossible, the unthinkable happened, and the “power elite” haven’t recovered. The very fact of Trump’s victory proved that the system itself needed a correction.

It was necessary to manufacture the undoing of Trump, the withdrawal of legitimacy, the reversal of history by other means. And so we got allegations of collusion with Russia, Stormy Daniels, “RESIST!,” impeachments, lawfare of various types, the Jan. 6 show trial, the Mar-a-Lago raid … and now the indictment. They’re all of a piece. Who cares how much these actions have distorted and vulgarized the public square? If they demoralize Trump supporters, the Great Unwashed, so much the better. Anything to discredit and topple their leader, no matter how flimsy and perverse the aggression.

A day or two after Trump won, I stepped inside the Union Square subway station in New York and discovered a long wall covered with post-it notes, thousands of them, all from Trump opponents, each bearing an expression of pain, dismay, fear or rage. This is not a sane reaction, I thought. None of the authors would worry if a newspaper broadcast an allegation against Trump using only one anonymous source, or if a prosecutor bent the law to absurd lengths to get an indictment. Rule of law, equal treatment, due process, democratic process, a Fourth Estate suspicious of the power elite … such norms don’t apply to a malignant agent. As a result, Trump opponents have become so illiberal, tribal and fixated that they’re ready to accept gross violations of civic tradition in order to take him down.

Those who support Trump must acknowledge this new illiberal reality. The elite’s destruction of civic customs is complete. In the coming months, we shall see pro-Trump forces using the same corrosive tactics — or lose utterly.

“The start of a new era in which no one is above the law.”

Julia Azari is a professor of political science at Marquette University.

Trump’s indictment might have a somewhat counterintuitive effect on the 2024 nomination race: His legal troubles might encourage other Republicans to get into the race, as we saw with long-shot candidate Asa Hutchinson last week. So far, we haven’t seen a stampede of new candidates. But if that does happen in response to any perceived vulnerability on Trump’s part, having a larger field of candidates could help him win the nomination by splitting up the non-Trump vote.

The connection between politics and presidential accountability is an even more interesting one, in my opinion. We don’t have a monarchy in this country, and presidents are supposed to have the same status as everyone else. But the presidency has long had an air of ceremony and statesmanship, signifying the power it holds. This makes the politics of holding the president accountable especially painful, for their political supporters and the country as a whole. Part of the logic of President Gerald Ford’s pardon of President Richard Nixon after Watergate was to end our “national nightmare.” But in 2023, things have changed. Politics often feels like a nightmare anyway, so there’s no sense in trying to dodge the conflict inevitable in a post-presidential investigation. Polarization has helped to erode some of the mystique of the office, and that might be a good thing in the end.

It’s impossible to separate law from politics entirely when charging a former president. It’s going to be messy, but possibly the start of a new era in which no one is above the law — not even those once charged with executing it.

This prosecution may be the only way to avert a slide into authoritarianism.

Kimberly Wehle is a visiting professor at the American University Washington College of Law.

As I wrote for POLITICO Magazine precisely a year ago, the cost of not indicting Trump would be a presidency without guardrails. Today, the stakes of this prosecution are arguably even higher, as he’s now a candidate for the 2024 presidential race and favored for the Republican nomination. Numerous polls have him at a double-digit lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

A criminally convicted Trump would look unappealing to many swing voters, potentially knocking him out of serious contention for the White House. It thus may be the only way to avert either another contested presidential election with widespread violence or, worse, a slide into authoritarianism.

Trump deserves credit for one thing, at the very least: He says what he is going to do, and he does it. If he is the GOP nominee, there are two possible outcomes. Both are deeply disturbing.

Trump could lose the election again. If that happens, he won’t go quietly. Nor will his supporters, who could revert to violence. A survey conducted for CNN last month showed that 63 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still believe that President Joe Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency. A study by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund found that, over the 18-month period from January 2020 through June 2021, there were 560 events where demonstrators brandished firearms, with violence erupting 16 percent of the time. The authors find that armed demonstrations are nearly six times as likely to turn violent than unarmed ones, and that the majority of armed demonstrations are driven by far-right mobilization and reactions to liberal and progressive activity.

The second option is that Trump wins the election, either legitimately or with the aid of Republican state legislatures’ caving to pressure to cancel popular votes for the Democratic candidate. GOP members of Congress could also refuse to gavel in a Democratic winner in January 2025, and successfully halt the vote count. Assuming he manages to take office, a second Trump presidency is a terrifying prospect. Just this week, Trump argued for defunding the Justice Department and the FBI, and he has previously planned to empty the national security and intelligence apparatuses and the State Department and replace staff with loyalists — a plan reported back in July. In 2019, Trump tweeted that his supporters could “demand” that he not leave office after two terms.

If any of that happens, America will no longer be a democracy. One way to prevent these outcomes is a criminal conviction for Trump, which will make it much harder for voters to support him and for GOP allies in Congress to continue their unabashed support. For now, we best not avert our gaze from the possible dangers ahead.

This indictment could lead to more Trump indictments.

John Culhane is distinguished professor of law at Delaware Law School, where he teaches courses in constitutional and family law. 

I’m not the best at political prognosticating. For instance, I never expected that Trump would survive a full term in office. And on the merits, he shouldn’t have. (Remember the first impeachment?) What I didn’t expect was the GOP’s craven complicity in his serial misdeeds. With few exceptions, they have slowly allowed themselves to be boiled alive in the toxic stew that Trump created — and kept refilling.

Will this historic first indictment of a U.S. president snap them out of it? I doubt it. Before even seeing the indictment, a large swath of the GOP and conservative media were condemning New York City’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for what they claim is a politically motivated prosecution. The criticism has hardly abated since the arraignment, either. Part of the problem is the complex, connect-the-dots nature of the crime alleged — paying a porn star “hush money,” but doing so by allegedly falsifying business records, which in turn is alleged to have been done to hide the story during the end stages of the 2016 presidential campaign. This isn’t the sort of crime that most people can really wrap their heads around, so Trump’s supporters can continue to trash the prosecutor. Even Utah Senator Mitt Romney has joined the condemnation choir, accusing Bragg of “stretching” the law to “fit a political agenda.”

But maybe this first indictment is just proof of concept; that, after well over 200 years since the founding of the country, a U.S. president can be held accountable. The dam has broken. And there are other, more significant investigations that may soon lead to further indictments — both by Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, and by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice. Whether our dismal political landscape may finally begin to shift will likely turn on whether these cases lead to further legal jeopardy for the former president, and whether the GOP will be made to pay at the polls in 2024 for continuing to ride the Trump train until it derails for good.

“The end result is long-term damage to the public’s confidence in the rule of law.”

Renato Mariotti is Legal Affairs Columnist for POLITICO Magazine.

Donald Trump now faces criminal charges in Manhattan, and soon he may face charges in Fulton County, Georgia, and perhaps in one or more federal courts. He has been attacking prosecutors and judges long before these criminal investigations were initiated, and he has already started making personal attacks against the judge and prosecutor in the Manhattan case. His words and actions have sown distrust in our criminal justice system and distract from the charges brought in Manhattan, which may soon be eclipsed by weightier charges brought in other jurisdictions.

Regardless of how those charges play out, the end result is long-term damage to the public’s confidence in the rule of law and the ability of the criminal justice system to police corruption in politics. We will ultimately pay a higher price than Trump does.

“This prosecution marks an end to the era of conflict avoidance with Trump and his fellow travelers.”

Will Stancil is a policy researcher at the University of Minnesota.

It's about time. A terrible legacy of Trump’s presidency is how he taught the worst political figures that they could bluff their way into total impunity. It’s become self-perpetuating: Authorities looked at the system’s inability to hold Trump accountable and took it as proof of his untouchability — or worse, assumed that accountability risks devastating political backlash.

Trump hasn’t wriggled his way out of various legal jams so much as law enforcement has talked itself out of putting him into those jams. It’s telling that the conspiracy at the root of Trump’s New York charges was also the subject of federal investigation — an investigation which has seemingly vanished into Merrick Garland’s filing cabinet. And of course, these charges are the least of Trump’s crimes.

We endanger ourselves when we won't impose consequences on the powerful. This prosecution marks an end to the era of conflict avoidance with Trump and his political fellow travelers. That's bad news for someone like Donald Trump, but a happy day for America.

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Tensions build around Jerusalem shrine after Syria rockets

JERUSALEM — Israeli warplanes and artillery struck targets in Syria following rare rocket fire from the northeastern neighbor, as Jewish-Muslim tensions reached a peak Sunday at a volatile Jerusalem shrine with simultaneous religious rituals.

Thousands of Jewish worshippers gathered at the city’s Western Wall, the holiest place where Jews can pray, for a mass priestly benediction prayer service for the Passover holiday. At the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, a walled esplanade above the Western Wall, hundreds of Palestinians performed prayers as part of observances during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Hundreds of Jews also visited the Al-Aqsa compound under heavy police guard Sunday, to whistles and religious chants from Palestinians protesting their presence.

Such tours by religious and nationalist Jews have increased in size and frequency over the years, and are viewed with suspicion by many Palestinians who fear that Israel plans one day to take over the site or partition it. Israeli officials say they have no intention of changing long-standing arrangements that allow Jews to visit, but not pray in the Muslim-administered site. However, the country is now governed by the most right-wing government in its history, with ultra-nationalists in senior positions.

Tensions have soared in the past week at the flashpoint shrine after an Israeli police raid on the mosque. On several occasions, Palestinians have barricaded themselves inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque with stones and firecrackers, demanding the right to pray there overnight, something Israel has in the past only allowed during the last 10 days of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Police removed them by force, detaining hundreds and leaving dozens injured.

The violence at the shrine triggered rocket fire by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, starting Wednesday, and Israeli airstrikes targeted both areas.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s media office announced that the militant group’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, received a delegation headed by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Sunday. The two discussed “the most important developments in occupied Palestine, the course of events at al-Aqsa Mosque, and the escalating resistance in the West Bank and Gaza, in addition to general political developments in the region, the readiness of the resistance axis and the cooperation of its parties,” the statement said.

Haniyeh, who arrived in Lebanon last week shortly before rockets were launched at Israel from south Lebanon, had been scheduled to make a public appearance in Beirut on Friday. But it was canceled for security reasons following the exchange of strikes between Lebanon and Israel. No group has officially claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks, but Israel has accused Hamas of being behind them.

Late on Saturday and early Sunday, militants in Syria fired rockets in two salvos toward Israel and the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights. A Damascus-based Palestinian group loyal to the Syrian government claimed responsibility for the first round of rockets, saying it was retaliating for the Al-Aqsa raids.

In the first salvo, one rocket landed in a field in the Golan Heights. Fragments of another destroyed missile fell into Jordanian territory near the Syrian border, Jordan’s military reported. In the second round, two of the rockets crossed the border into Israel, with one being intercepted and the second landing in an open area, the Israeli military said.

Israel responded with artillery fire into the area in Syria from where the rockets were fired. Later, the military said Israeli fighter jets attacked Syrian army sites, including a compound of Syria’s 4th Division and radar and artillery posts.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the violence in a telephone call with Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog late Saturday, telling Herzog that Muslims could not remain silent about the “provocations and threats” against the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and said the hostilities that have spread to Gaza and Lebanon should not be allowed to escalate further.

In addition to the cross-border fighting, three people were killed over the weekend in Palestinian attacks in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

The funeral for two British-Israeli sisters, Maia and Rina Dee, who were killed in a shooting was scheduled for Sunday at a cemetery in the Jewish settlement of Kfar Etzion in the occupied West Bank.

An Italian tourist, Alessandro Parini, 35, a lawyer from Rome, had just arrived in the city a few hours earlier with some friends for a brief Easter holiday. He was killed Friday in a suspected car-ramming on Tel Aviv’s beachside promenade.

Over 90 Palestinians and have been killed by Israeli fire so far this year, at least half of them affiliated with militant groups, according to a tally by The Associated Press. Palestinian attacks on Israelis have killed 19 people in that time. All but one were civilians.

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The tension at the heart of the European Central Bank

Tricky dilemma splits central bank chiefs.

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Ben Ferencz, last living Nuremberg prosecutor of Nazis, dies

Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labor and concentration camps, has died. He had just turned 103 in March.

Ferencz died Friday evening in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to St. John's University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog about the Nuremberg trials. The death also was confirmed by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.

“Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted.

Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated as a very young boy with his parents to New York to escape rampant antisemitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the U.S. Army in time to take part in the Normandy invasion during World War II. Using his legal background, he became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against U.S. soldiers as part of a new War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate’s Office.

When U.S. intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving people in Nazi camps watched over by SS guards, Ferencz followed up with visits, first at the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany and then at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. At those camps and later others, he found bodies “piled up like cordwood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other ailments, retching in their louse ridden bunks or on the ground with only their pathetic eyes pleading for help,” Ferencz wrote in an account of his life.

“The Buchenwald concentration camp was a charnel house of indescribable horrors,” Ferencz wrote. “There is no doubt that I was indelibly traumatized by my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi extermination centers. I still try not to talk or think about the details.”

At one point toward the end of the war, Ferencz was sent to Adolf Hitler's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps to search for incriminating documents but came back empty-handed.

After the war, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army and returned to New York to begin practicing law. But that was short-lived. Because of his experiences as a war crimes investigator, he was recruited to help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, which had begun under the leadership of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Before leaving for Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude.

At the age of 27, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz became chief prosecutor for a 1947 case in which 22 former commanders were charged with murdering over 1 million Jews, Romani and other enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe. Rather than depending on witnesses, Ferencz mostly relied on official German documents to make his case. All the defendants were convicted, and more than a dozen were sentenced to death by hanging even though Ferencz hadn't asked for the death penalty.

“At the beginning of April 1948, when the long legal judgment was read, I felt vindicated,” he wrote. “Our pleas to protect humanity by the rule of law had been upheld.”

With the war crimes trials winding down, Ferencz went to work for a consortium of Jewish charitable groups to help Holocaust survivors regain properties, homes, businesses, art works, Torah scrolls, and other Jewish religious items that had been confiscated from them by the Nazis. He also later assisted in negotiations that would lead to compensation to the Nazi victims.

In later decades, Ferencz championed the creation of an international court which could prosecute any government’s leaders for war crimes. Those dreams were realized in 2002 with establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, though its effectiveness has been limited by the failure of countries like the United States to participate.

Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. His wife died in 2019.

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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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