법무부, 반무기화 기금 일시 중단 / 이란 협상 난항 / 캘리포니아 예비선거
The Justice Department agrees to pause Trump’s controversial anti-weaponization fund after a court order, while U.S.-Iran nuclear talks face new complications from Israel’s expanding war in Lebanon, and six states hold primary elections including California.
오늘 에피소드에는 미국 정치와 외교 분야의 핵심 표현들이 많이 나옵니다. “abide by”(~을 준수하다), “bipartisan backlash”(양당의 반발), “holding pattern”(대기 상태) 같은 표현들은 뉴스 영어에서 자주 쓰입니다. 각 표현이 어떤 문맥에서 쓰이는지 주목하며 읽어 보세요. 특히 정치 기사에서는 같은 사건을 다양한 각도에서 표현하는 방식을 익히는 것이 중요합니다.
The Justice Department says it will abide by a court order that temporarily blocks President Trump’s anti-weaponization fund.
Some Senate Republicans want the White House to end it for good.
Iran said it was done negotiating if Israel didn’t stop attacking Lebanon. Trump says he called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told him to hold off on plans to strike the capital.
Are the U.S. and Israel’s interests in the Middle East diverging?
And it’s primary day in six states, including California, where Democrats hope a new congressional map will help them flip up to five Republican-held seats.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is retiring, and her House seat is also up for grabs.
The Trump administration says it will not violate a court order. The order is about the president’s $1.8 billion pool of money to pay people who claim that past administrations targeted them.
Democrats and Republicans in Congress have opposed the fund since it was announced.
A judge temporarily blocked the administration from creating it last week, and Monday the Justice Department said it would, quote, “abide” by that temporary ruling.
Here to make sense of all this is NPR political reporter Elena Moore. So, Elena, a lot of back-and-forth on this. Chop it up for us.
Yeah. So this all connects back to a different lawsuit. Back in February, President Trump announced he was suing his own government over a 2019 leak of his tax records. So he sued the IRS for $10 billion. But then last month, when a federal judge in Florida overseeing that case started questioning its merits,
Trump dropped the case, and the administration announced a settlement where the Justice Department would start this anti-weaponization fund to compensate people who were allegedly targeted by the government for their political beliefs.
And, A, that drew bipartisan backlash and concerns that it could be used to pay people who were convicted for storming the Capitol on January 6.
What did the Trump administration have to say about that?
Well, in a statement on X Monday, the Department of Justice said it strongly disagrees with the court’s ruling.
The DOJ also defended who would qualify for this fund, saying it was available to anybody who was, quote, “weaponized, targeted or persecuted, whether they were Democrat, Republican, conservative, independent or otherwise,” end quote. NPR also reached out to the White House for a comment, but a White House spokesperson pointed to this same statement.
All right, so it’s paused. But is paused going to eventually lead to stopped?
Right. Well, at this moment, that is unclear. Right now, it’s on hold, and the federal judge in Virginia overseeing the case has to decide whether that temporary restraining order should be permanent.
There’s a hearing scheduled for June 12, but we really can’t say how the judge will rule and we don’t know how the administration will respond. So a bit of a holding pattern right now,
and that’s notable because this has caused a lot of headaches for the White House. You know, we don’t see Republicans break with the president very often, but this is an issue where there has been some rare pushback within the party.
Even after the DOJ’s statement yesterday about abiding by the court’s decision, we saw multiple Senate Republicans push for the White House to just end the fund.
Yeah. So what might this mean for the president’s agenda?
Well, remember; the midterms are fast approaching, and Republicans are trying to score some legislative wins, but we’ve already seen this fund become a distraction.
Last month, it derailed Republicans’ plans to pass some $70 billion for immigration enforcement.
Senate Republicans want to try again to pass it this week, but the anti-weaponization fund has been complicating that because Democrats have been promising to introduce amendments that would put GOP lawmakers on the record about the fund,
and that could be a difficult result for the White House. You know, we know that as many as 30 Republicans have indicated they might support a vote to ban the fund. Also, you know, I said it was rare for GOP lawmakers to break with the president. What’s more rare, A — when his base does.
An Economist/YouGov poll from last week found that less than a third of MAGA voters support this fund.
Israel has not bombed Beirut today.
The fact that Israel did not attack the capital is news because Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Monday that the attack was coming and would target Hezbollah offices in Lebanon’s capital. Israel’s war with Lebanon has complicated President Trump’s negotiations with Iran, which threatened to suspend those talks yesterday.
Here to discuss the latest is NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy in Dubai. So walk us through what happened.
All right. So it was midday yesterday in Israel when Netanyahu published a video in Hebrew saying there would be no situation in which Hezbollah attacks Israeli cities while its offices in south Beirut remain off-limits.
And then he said he instructed the military to bomb targets in the capital. And it’s part of a broader offensive by Israel in Lebanon that’s been rapidly expanding.