The FBI’s Washington Field Office is folding its federal public corruption squad, the same unit that aided Jack Smith’s special counsel investigation into President Donald Trump, three people familiar with the matter tell NBC News.

The field office has three units that work on public corruption issues, but this one — known internally as "CR15" — was deeply involved in the bureau’s "Arctic Frost" investigation, which was the precursor to the Smith probe into efforts to overturn the 2020 election results by Trump and his allies. That investigation resulted in one of the two federal criminal cases against Trump, both of which were dropped after his election.

The move to shutter the unit comes amid a major shift of FBI resources towards immigration enforcement, an area that is primarily the responsibility of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. A top leader in the FBI’s Washington Field Office was also recently reassigned, two people familiar with the matter said. A FBI official said the person was not reassigned for any adversarial reason.

The cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and six other people have been arrested after disrupting a United States Senate hearing to protest Washington’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

The arrests on Wednesday came as US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr was giving testimony to lawmakers on his shake-up of federal health agencies.

“Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the US,” Cohen said as he was escorted away by police.

A panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down one of the key remaining ways of enforcing the federal Voting Rights Act in seven mainly Midwestern states.

For decades, private individuals and groups have brought the majority of lawsuits for enforcing the landmark law's Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in the election process.

But in a 2-1 ruling released Wednesday, the three-judge panel found that Section 2 cannot be enforced by lawsuits from private parties under a separate federal statute known as Section 1983.

That statute gives individuals the right to sue state and local government officials for violating their civil rights. Section 1983 stems from the Ku Klux Klan Act that Congress passed after the Civil War to protect Black people in the South from white supremacist violence, and voting rights advocates have considered it an antidote to a controversial 2023 decision by a different federal appeals panel that made it harder to enforce Section 2 in the 8th Circuit.

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President Trump campaigned on a pledge to fight antisemitism.

"Antisemitic bigotry has no place in a civilized society," Trump said at an event in 2024.

However, the president's critics question whether antisemitism may have found a place within his administration.

NPR has identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a "Nazi sympathizer," and a prominent Holocaust denier.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Trump administration has used the fight against antisemitism as justification for the deportation of pro-Palestinian student protesters and funding cuts to universities.

Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, argues that the administration is using antisemitism as a pretext.

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