Ethics officials at Fannie Mae were removed from their jobs as they investigated whether a top Trump ally improperly accessed mortgage documents of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and other Democratic officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

William Pulte, a staunch Trump defender and the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), has accused James, Adam Schiff, a California senator, and Lisa Cook, a federal reserve governor, of mortgage fraud. All three have denied the accusations and James was indicted on specious federal charges last month.

Experts have raised questions about all three referrals and see them as a thinly veiled effort by Trump to target political rivals.

After Pulte made the referrals, former agency officials and experts told the Guardian they were highly unusual. Individualized mortgage data is highly sensitive and protected. And investigations into mortgage fraud are not typically handled by the FHFA inspector general, an agency watchdog staffed with investigative agents.

Ethics and internal investigation officials at Fannie Mae, the mortgage financing provider, had received internal complaints that senior officials at FHFA had ordered employees to access the mortgage documents of James and others, the Journal reported on Tuesday. They passed on their investigation to the inspector general’s office, who subsequently forwarded it to the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. Trump installed an ally, Lindsey Halligan, in that job last month.

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The Supreme Court is staying out of the fight over funding food benefits for now as a deal in Congress to end the government shutdown appears likely to be approved.

The court on Nov. 11 said it would not immediately rule on an order directing the Trump administration to fully fund Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits during the government shutdown − which lawmakers could resolve as soon as Wednesday.

The court kept a district judge's funding order on hold through Nov. 13, freezing action without considering which side has the better legal arguments.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had previously paused the district judge's funding deadline while the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was considering it. The request went to Jackson, the justice who handles emergency appeals from that part of the country, putting one of the court's three liberal justices in the awkward position of granting a request from the administration on an issue of top concern for Democrats.

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Department of Justice officials said they’re launching civil rights and terrorism investigations into protests outside a Turning Point USA event on the University of California, Berkeley campus on Nov. 10, in another escalation by the Trump administration to combat what it views as left-leaning dissenters in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death.

Harmeet Dhillon, the U.S. assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, shared clips of the protest on social media and said an investigation was on the way. Attorney General Pam Bondi followed with her own post, announcing the incident is under "full investigation by the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force." Both suggested an antifa, or anti-fascist movement, connection.

"The @CivilRights will investigate what happened here, and I see several issues of serious concern regarding campus and local security and Antifa’s ability to operate with impunity in CA," Dhillon said on X.

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Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime associate and co-conspirator who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, is reportedly preparing a “commutation application” for the Trump administration to review, according to new allegations from a whistleblower shared with House Democrats.

Democrats on the House judiciary committee announced on Monday that they had received information from a whistleblower that indicates that the British former socialite, 63, is working on filing a commutation application. They also said Maxwell had been receiving special treatment at federal prison camp Bryan in Texas – the minimum-security facility she was transferred to earlier this year.

Congressman Jamie Raskin, the ranking member and top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, stated in a news release that the prison’s warden was also “helping” Maxwell “copy, print, and send documents” to support her bid for clemency.

The exact content of this “commutation application” was unclear, Raskin added.

Raskin states that according to the whistleblower, Maxwell has been receiving “customized” meals that are “personally delivered” to her cell, and that the warden has “personally arranged” private meetings for Maxwell and her visitors. The visits allegedly include providing a “special cordoned-off area” for visitors to arrive, as well as “an assortment of snacks and refreshments for her guests”.

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