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A bill targeting Russia with substantial new sanctions is gaining momentum in the Senate, with a key GOP senator signaling Tuesday that President Donald Trump is now on board.

“We’re moving,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the bill’s author, adding that Trump “told me it’s time to move so we’re going to move.”

Graham joined Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other Republican senators in signaling a scheduling announcement later this week. That could set up the long-stalled bill to come to the floor later this month.

The burst of momentum comes after Trump publicly suggested Tuesday he was seriously looking at the sanctions bill as he aired sharp frustrations with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to enter peace negotiations with Ukraine.

Behind the scenes, Graham and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) tweaked the bill to provide expanded presidential waiver authority. That, they believe, addresses the White House’s push for more flexibility for Trump.

While the existing bill would let Trump waive sanctions on nations purchasing Russian oil or uranium for 180 days, the revised bill provides for a second 180-day waiver, Graham said. Invoking the second waiver would prompt a congressional vote, though he did not detail what the vote would entail.

“I’m confident the president is ready for us to act,” Graham said.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment on Graham’s statement and instead pointed to Trump’s public comments earlier Tuesday.

The sanctions will not be on the floor this week, according to two people granted anonymity to disclose private scheduling.

But Thune told reporters he’s coordinating closely with the White House and House on timing.

“We’ll have more to say about that later this week,” Thune told reporters, adding that there’s a “lot of interest” in moving the bill.

Jake Traylor contributed to this report.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to vote July 17 on the nominations for Emil Bove — President Donald Trump’s controversial judicial nominee for the Third Circuit — and Jeanine Pirro — the former Fox News host who Trump tapped to be U.S. attorney for D.C. — according to a committee aide granted anonymity to share not-yet-public schedule information.

Bove, who is principal associate deputy attorney general and served as Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, has become the latest Trump nominee to face a mounting opposition campaign from Democrats, after a former Justice Department employee alleged that he suggested flouting court orders to allow the administration to pursue its aggressive deportation agenda.

Bove’s role in carrying out some other DOJ initiatives has also garnered scrutiny, including the dismissal of corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the firing of some DOJ staffers who worked on cases around the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Trump nominated Pirro to be the U.S. attorney after he failed to rally enough support among the Senate GOP around his previous nominee, Ed Martin. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a member of the Judiciary panel who has since announced he won’t seek reelection, said he would not support Martin because of his comments about the attacks on the Capitol and his defense of some rioters.

Pirro is currently serving as U.S. attorney for D.C. in an interim capacity.

House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington says Republicans shouldn’t give up on advancing certain priorities that were cut out of their “big, beautiful bill” for not complying with Senate rules, telling reporters Tuesday that lawmakers will try again in follow-up budget reconciliation packages.

“There may be a longer list of things that were kicked out by the Senate parliamentarian as non-compliant with the Byrd rule — I think we should make another run at that and look for ways to structure the provisions so that it’s more fundamentally budgetary in impact and policy,” the Texas Republican said during the press call Tuesday afternoon. “I suspect that’s why they were kicked out.”

The so-called Byrd rule limits what provisions can be included in a bill moving through Congress through the reconciliation process, which allows lawmakers to skirt the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate. Arrington specifically pointed to one provision stripped in the Senate from the House-passed megabill that would have prohibited Medicaid coverage for gender affirming surgeries, and another that would have banned noncitizens from tapping into Medicaid resources.

“I think those — we need to spend more time” crafting the provisions to pass muster with the parliamentarian, Arrington said. “I don’t think we spent enough time to look for a pathway to success on them, and that’s sort of the landscape, as I see it, of the opportunities in another reconciliation bill.”

Echoing Speaker Mike Johnson‘s recent comments, Arrington said he suspects GOP leaders will attempt to do two more party-line packages in the 119th Congress, with the next one slated for the fall.

Arrington added members would likely demand that those additional measures be drafted under circumstances where both chambers adhere to the same budget framework, avoiding a repeat of the most recent scenario where House and Senate Republicans each gave their committees different deficit reduction targets.

He lamented the fact that the Senate did not comply with the House’s aggressive instructions for writing iits version of the megabill, but credited fiscal hawks for helping secure $1.5 trillion in savings in a final product, and noted that it was not “feasible” to expect the full magnitude of cost savings would be acheived in a single reconciliation bill — “politically, at least.”

As it currently stands, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law over the weekend, is “front loaded with costs and back-end loaded with savings,” which Arrington said should compel Republicans to make sure the administration follows through in “mak[ing] sure the savings actually happen.”

“That was a concern among conservative budget hawks,” Arrington said. “When I think about the Budget Committee’s role going forward, one of the things that we need to do … is keep the pressure on the Senate, on the House and the administration to be diligent in implementation and enforcement.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday that he hopes to have an announcement soon on the fate of a long-stalled bill to impose new sanctions targeting Russia.

“We’ll have more to say about that later this week,” Thune told reporters, adding that there’s a “lot of interest” in moving the bill authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Thune has been looking for a clear signal from President Donald Trump that he would support the legislation, which has more than 80 supporters. Trump opened the door to the legislation earlier Tuesday, saying that he’s “looking at it very strongly” as he aired fresh frustrations with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing military campaign in Ukraine.

The sanctions legislation is not expected to be on the floor this week but could be brought to the floor before the scheduled August recess.

Sen. Mitch McConnell praised President Donald Trump for walking back a pause on weapons shipments to Ukraine while chastising “isolationists and restrainers” in his orbit for moves that he said undermine U.S. credibility abroad.

The latest broadside from the former Senate GOP leader, who has emerged as a foil to Trump on Ukraine and other defense issues, came after Trump said Monday that aid would again flow to Kyiv after the Pentagon paused some weapons shipments. The Kentucky Republican dinged both the administration’s restrictions on aid and a military budget he has called insufficient.

“Today, the strategic incoherence of underfunding our military and restricting lethal assistance to partners like Ukraine is measured in the avoidable erosion of American credibility with allies and the mounting deaths of innocents,” McConnell said in a statement.

While Trump told reporters Monday that more aid would be coming, he didn’t provide specifics: “They have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard now. … We have to send more weapons, defensive weapons, primarily.”

McConnell avoided criticizing Trump, crediting the president with delivering weapons to Ukraine during his first term. But he argued Trump must brush off advisers who want to cut off U.S. involvement in its conflict with Russia.

That, he said, means going beyond supplying “defensive weapons” to the Ukrainian and sidelining “those at DoD who invoke munitions shortages to block aid while refusing to invest seriously in expanding munitions production.”

POLITICO first reported the Pentagon had opted to halt some weapons shipments to Ukraine, a move driven by defense policy chief Elbridge Colby over concerns that certain U.S. stockpiles were running low.

McConnell was the only Republican to oppose Colby’s confirmation, citing the vocal China hawk’s longtime advocacy for focusing U.S. military resources on the Pacific at the expense of other conflicts, including Ukraine’s. Though he didn’t name Colby, McConnell’s statement alluded to resistance to the AUKUS submarine pact between the U.S., U.K. and Australia, which Colby is now reviewing. Both the AUKUS review and the Ukraine pause blindsided some lawmakers and officials elsewhere in the administration.

“The self-indulgent policymaking of restrainers — from Ukraine to AUKUS — has so often required the President to clean up his staff’s messes,” McConnell said.

Another top Republican, House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers of Alabama, argued Trump’s decision to resume military aid will make clear Russian President Vladimir Putin “must come to the negotiating table” to end the war with Ukraine.

“President Trump is right that now is not the time to pause U.S. military aid to support Ukraine’s defense,” he said in a statement.

Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump are pushing to jam the House again. This time, it’s all about crypto.

The brewing clash — not unlike the megabill saga — is over how big and how quickly Hill Republicans should deliver on one of Trump’s most notable campaign pledges. In this case, it’s about Trump’s promise to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the world.”

The Senate last month passed a bipartisan bill to boost a specific slice of the crypto universe — so-called stablecoins — but the House GOP is now wrestling with a desire to go bigger. It’s gearing up for a full-blown “crypto week” to make the case when House members return next Monday.

House Republicans, who spent years incubating crypto legislation that Senate Democrats were unwilling to touch, plan to vote on the Senate stablecoin bill and a wider-ranging “market structure” plan to overhaul securities and commodities rules impacting crypto trading.

The big hurdle for House Republicans is that Trump and Senate Republicans aren’t on board with tweaking the stablecoin bill or using it as a vehicle to take a bigger swing on crypto policy. Trump says he wants a “clean” version of the bill “lightning fast” and key GOP senators say they won’t take up a market structure overhaul until September.

Senate Republicans say it would be near impossible to muster Democrats to pass a revised stablecoin bill.

“For me to get eight or nine Democrats to vote for something here is extraordinarily difficult to do,” said Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), the lead sponsor of the Senate stablecoin bill, known as the GENIUS Act.

House GOP leaders signaled last week they won’t seek to combine that legislation with their broader revamp, but they haven’t yet said whether they will make changes to the measure.

House Financial Services Chair French Hill’s sweeping market structure bill, which is the crown jewel of the House GOP’s crypto push, is also the subject of eleventh-hour negotiating among House lawmakers ahead of next week’s floor vote.

The Arkansas Republican is working to secure wide bipartisan backing that would signal its political viability to the Senate. But some Democrats who have been on board in the past are withholding support unless the bill imposes restrictions on the Trump family’s entanglements in the crypto industry.

“For me, and I suspect for some other Democrats, if we can satisfy this question of conflict of interest — meaning there’s a prohibition on the president being an issuer — a lot of us can get to ‘yes,’” said Rep. Jim Himes, a senior Connecticut Democrat on House Financial Services. “They’re working in good faith to try to get us to ‘yes.’”

What else we’re watching:

— Netanyahu on the Hill: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and meet with Speaker Mike Johnson at 11:45 a.m. Netanyahu will then have a bipartisan Senate meeting with leaders John Thune and Chuck Schumer at 4 p.m., per two people granted anonymity to discuss the plans. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries didn’t comment when we asked whether he plans to meet with Netanyahu.

— NDAA markups begin: Senate Armed Services will begin subcommittee markups of the National Defense Authorization Act at 4:30 p.m. The full panel will debate and vote on the whole package starting Wednesday at 9:45 a.m. (reminder: this could take several days).

— Rescissions updates: Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) is gearing up to offer amendments to Trump’s request to claw back $9.4 billion in already-approved funds ahead of the Senate’s July 18 deadline, and the contours of her desired tweaks are starting to take shape. Collins has already said she is strongly against the White House’s proposed cuts to foreign aid and told Maine Public Radio that she would like to prevent drastic funding reductions to public media, too.

Jordain Carney contributed to this report.

A bipartisan group of senators will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday as part of his multi-day swing through Washington.

The Senate meeting, first reported by POLITICO, will include Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, as well as a host of other Republican and Democratic senators, according to two people granted anonymity to disclose the private gathering.

Netanyahu is set to make the rounds elsewhere on Capitol Hill Tuesday. He’s also scheduled to meet with Speaker Mike Johnson in the morning. A spokesperson for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries didn’t respond to questions about whether the New York Democrat will also meet with Netanyahu while he’s at the Capitol.

His visit with members of Congress comes as the Trump administration faces criticism from Democrats, and a small number of Republicans, for not seeking authorization from Congress last month over its strikes against Iran. Netanyahu heavily lobbied Trump to target Iran’s nuclear program following Israel’s own strikes on Iran.

The White House is also pushing for a ceasefire for the fighting in Gaza. Netanyahu met Monday with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and is also meeting with President Donald Trump Monday evening.

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report. 

Former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. is quietly exploring a comeback in Illinois’ 2nd Congressional District after more than a decade out of office — including a two-year prison term.

Jackson — the son of civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. and the brother of Rep. Jonathan Jackson — was a Democratic rising star who served in Congress 17 years before stepping down in 2012 due to health reasons. A federal conviction for campaign finance violations and prison time followed for him and his then-wife, Sandi, a former Chicago alderman.

After working as a Chicago radio commentator, Jackson is now talking to residents and community leaders about another run, motivated by what allies describe as concern about the ripple effect of President Donald Trump’s megabill that was signed into law July 4.

He has caught the attention of some key Democrats, including retired Rep. Bobby Rush, who said Jackson would give voice to “the marginalized and the forgotten American citizens of the Second Congressional District,” according to a statement he sent to Playbook. The district stretches through Chicago’s South Side, once a stronghold for Jackson, and into the suburbs.

The seat opened up when Democratic Rep. Robin Kelly, who has held the seat since 2013, announced she’s running for Senate earlier this year. Several notable names have said they’re entering the March Democratic primary, including state Sen. Robert Peters, management consultant Eric France and policy expert Adal Regis. Democratic Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller is also weighing a bid.

But Jackson, Rush said, would be “the most qualified and ready-made of all the candidates.”

Democratic Rep. Don Davis is exploring a run for the North Carolina Senate seat being vacated by retiring GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, according to a spokesperson.

Davis is “looking at all options and not ruling anything out,” said the spokesperson, Hannah Spengler. But running for the Senate seat would mean giving up a competitive House seat in a district won by President Donald Trump last year. Davis narrowly won reelection last year, and Republicans have signaled they’ll try to flip the seat again this cycle.

Former Rep. Wiley Nickel is already running on the Democratic side, and former Gov. Roy Cooper, who remains popular in North Carolina, also looms large over the race. He’s expected to make a decision this summer.

Among Republicans, Lara Trump — the president’s daughter-in-law and a Wilmington native — is looking at the race, as are RNC Chair Michael Whatley and Rep. Pat Harrigan.

Speaking to reporters Monday, North Carolina’s other Republican senator — Ted Budd — said the GOP has a “great bench” and said Lara Trump would be a “very viable” candidate given her ties to the state: “If she wants it we would of course be supportive,” he said.

“When you look at those outside the political realm that possibly want to run, you look at those that are in the U.S. House, you got a lot of good candidates there, so who knows how this will shake out?” Budd added.

A few weeks ago, my POLITICO colleague Nicholas Wu and NBC’s Sahil Kapur ran into D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in the Capitol. Like good congressional reporters, they jumped at the opportunity to pepper a lawmaker about the news of the day. In this case, one question concerned Norton herself, a civil rights icon who is now the oldest House member: Would she run for another term next year, by which point she would be 89 years old? “Yeah, sure,” Norton said.

Coming on the heels of multiple stories about Norton’s alleged cognitive decline, the statement made news. But a few hours later, Norton’s office began unmaking that news. The Democrat “wants to run again but she’s in conversations with her family, friends, and closest advisors to decide what’s best,” a spokesperson told Wu. There was still no final decision.

It was all awkward and embarrassing — and did little to buttress Norton’s insistence that she’s as sharp as ever. And then, amazingly, it happened again. Last week, Kapur once again approached the delegate and asked about her plans. Once again, she said she’s running: “Yeah, I’m going to run for re-election.” And once again, her spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, telling Axios that “no decision has been made.”

The spokesperson, Sharon Nichols, did not offer any explanation for the discrepancy. She also didn’t respond when I asked her for details of what happened or whether journalists should take future Norton statements at face value.

That last question is relevant even if you don’t much care about the electoral plans of one non-voting delegate. For people interested in how Washington works, it’s an increasingly common issue in our era of gerontocracy: Just how are you supposed to interact with an elected official who might not be all there?

It’s an ongoing private conversation among reporters, animated by a sense that the watchdogs haven’t been zealous enough — but featuring no real agreement on how to handle these moments.

“I’m on the fence about it,” said New York Times congressional reporter Annie Karni, the author of her own recent piece about Norton’s struggles. “Is it newsworthy to be even doing this dance where you ask her a thing, she says something that makes no sense, and staff has to walk it back? Like, what are we doing? Or are we showing the problem? I don’t know what the answer is.”

“Every reporter has a story about this,” said Kristin Wilson, who was a CNN Capitol Hill producer until last year. Incidents that couldn’t be explained away sometimes made news, like the time the late GOP Sen. Thad Cochran got lost in the Capitol, or the time a colleague had to instruct late Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein to “just say aye” at a vote. When Texas Rep. Kay Granger struggled with dementia at the end of her term last year, it fell to a Dallas news site to reveal it. But many quieter interactions involving nonsensical quotes never got published. “I think we have pulled punches,” Wilson said.

Wilson recalled an incident when her team was interviewing the late GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch for a story on senators’ hideaway offices: “Hatch kind of went off on a tangent of a story, and as he’s telling the story, his aide is just like looking at me and his eyes are just massive, like he knew Hatch had just sort of gone down a bad path.”

In the end, the tangent wasn’t germane to the story. “The Hill is like living in a small town,” Wilson said. “And you know all these people, and you’re around them all the time. Are you going to be that person in that small town that you’re in?”

For journalists, the answer to that question is supposed to be: Yes, that’s exactly who we are! But the exigencies of managing a Hill beat that requires a daily stream of scoops makes it tough to latch onto every potentially embarrassing comment. Publishing them, after all, might enrage the staffers who tip you to those scoops — and confuse readers who just want accuracy.

It turns out Norton’s staff had good reason to think they could simply contradict their boss’ comments without it becoming a story: There’s a long history of spokespeople cajoling media outlets into cleaning up the incorrect, impolitic, or downright addled things that lawmakers say when they get buttonholed by Capitol Hill reporters.

Oftentimes, these involve non-craven fixes. “My rule of thumb was that I’m not in the business of playing gotcha,” said Todd Gillman, a former longtime Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News. “People misspeak. They mix up a bill, a vote or a person. There’s a slip of the tongue. I’ve always let people clean up things like that. I’m going for substance.”

Yet the culture of cleaning up makes it harder to say no when you suspect that the slip of the tongue may actually be the substance. “Seems like the tradeoffs don’t change, though the calculus might,” Gillman told me. “Are you willing to incur some wrath for ignoring their lobbying?” Until Joe Biden’s presidency pushed the national conversation about aging officials, the answer wasn’t always self-evident.

And it comes up particularly often in the Capitol, one of the strangest media environments in America, a place where beat reporters can count on running into VIPs in public hallways and asking for quotes on even the most obscure matters. It’s as if Hollywood reporters could count on buttonholing Clint Eastwood every time he was at the office.

For staffers, this means a lot of work keeping track of potential messes. Brad White, who ran Cochran’s senatorial office before the Republican’s retirement amid health problems at age 80, said his colleagues’ clean-up work was more often about vernacular than mental capacity. “He would confuse some reporters because somebody would say, ‘Well, how are y’all coming on the budget negotiations?’ And he would say something that was more of a generational statement from Mississippi, like, ‘Well, we’re getting down to the lip lock.’ And nobody knew what the hell that might mean.”

All the same, as Cochran struggled, White managed around the edges. “He was an older guy,” White said. “He’d have good days and bad days, and there were days maybe that I would decide today is not the day we need to talk about this issue.” In Cochran’s case, he said, the senator was planning to resign but the timing was complicated by a budget process. “If you’ve got a member that is facing those types of issues, and you can tell that they’re working their way out, then that deserves some grace,” he said. “If you got a member that has no business being there and they’re clutching onto it like the Pope, then maybe that’s worthy of a discussion.”

To their credit, Wu and Kapur both reported the interactions with Norton as they happened, and reported the office’s statements to the contrary. It was an easy call, they both told me: The question at issue — would Norton run again? — was personal and ultimately can only be answered by her. It’s not the same as flubbing details of a 1,000-page bill.

Ed Wasserman, the former dean of the University of California’s graduate school of journalism and a longtime writer about media ethics, thinks the journalistic hand-wringing about how to describe cringey moments may actually make it harder to enlighten the public: “One of the problems is that reporters routinely handle incoherence and inconsistency by ignoring it, so a decision to convey it to readers as significant already rests on a belief that there’s some underlying dysfunction,” he said.

Wasserman said the principled position ought to be that lawmakers’ moments of confusion are news, period. Cleaning it up “is not really an option,” Wasserman said. “This is clearly performance related. And their job performance is your job to report on.”

The challenge is that it’s also a reporter’s job to cover the day’s debate about a bill or a nomination. Inserting incoherent comments from a lawmaker can confuse most readers — even if it enlightens a subset of folks interested in that particular lawmaker’s state of mind. “It’s weird that in the Capitol, people know which lawmakers you can’t really talk to substantively, and avoid them,” said Karni. “When you’re not reporting on the age issue, which I have reported a lot on, I think it’s important to just know who is not able to participate like that.”

By way of example, she cites yet another kerfuffle over yet another Norton comment: In April, the lawmaker told a reporter that she might try to become the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. The news kicked off a round of Democratic agita about aging leadership clinging to power. Hours later, her office put out a statement from Norton taking herself out of contention. The incident may have said something about Norton, but it didn’t really help the (probably larger) number of people who just want to be up to date about the committee’s future.

“Is this productive? Is this fair? She’s clearly not running for Oversight. So having her say that, it created a dumb news cycle with this kind of faux outrage,” Karni said. “You could say, ‘Are you thinking about running for president?’ And she might say, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ So what are we doing when we’re asking that question?”

It makes for a weird status quo: One set of lawmakers who can be grilled about legislative issues, another who are considered out to lunch, everyone keeping secret mental lists of who’s who, and no one feeling able to publish them because, after all, who can really prove what’s going on in someone’s head?

“The conundrum is you’re not going to be able to reach that judgment without applying certain standards that you’re not necessarily able to reach because you’re not a psychiatrist or you don’t really know them,” Wasserman said. “But at the same time, you know enough. You see what’s an indication that they’re not enough in command of the intellectual challenges of the job. … You have no reason to apologize for that. It’s your job.”