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The post-midterm shake-up at the top of the Justice Department continued Monday with a senior official resigning and President Donald Trump considering nominating another department leader to the federal bench.
Brett Shumate — head of the department’s civil division, which has been responsible for leading the defense of many of the Trump administration’s most controversial policies in court — submitted his resignation Monday, Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
Meanwhile, a White House official said Trump is “actively considering” nominating T. Elliot Gaiser — head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel — to the federal bench in North Texas. The OLC is charged with assessing the legality of actions or policies the executive branch wants to pursue.
Although the official described Gaiser’s nomination as a possibility, a Senate Judiciary Committee aide said members were sent Gaiser’s responses to a detailed questionnaire for the judicial role Sunday night. That step normally takes place only after a nomination has been made. Both the official and the aide spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic details of the process.
Gaiser, a former Ohio solicitor general, appears to have no professional ties to Texas outside of a judicial clerkship he held between 2016 and 2017, according to his questionnaire response, which was reviewed by The Washington Post. In it, he said the office of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) contacted him about the potential opening the day after the election. He had subsequent conversations with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and the White House, Gaiser said on the form.
Gaiser would need to be confirmed as a judge by the Senate before he officially secured the new job.
Shumate’s departure and the potential loss of Gaiser come amid a greater post-Election Day exodus at the Justice Department, an agency that has seen significant personnel churn and an overhaul of priorities since the start of Trump’s second term.
Following last week’s election, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division, John Eisenberg, head of the national security division, and Jason Reding Quiñones, the top prosecutor in South Florida, have all announced their resignations.
A recount is underway in the razor-thin race for Florida’s 27th Congressional District, with Miami-Dade’s elections chief helping oversee it despite allegations that she has a conflict of interest.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R) faces Eliott Rodriguez (D) in the heavily Hispanic district, which covers parts of Miami and Coral Gables. Salazar claimed victory Tuesday, although the Associated Press has yet to call the race.
Florida’s secretary of state ordered a machine recount Saturday after unofficial county returns put Salazar ahead by 1,090 votes, or 0.44 percentage points. State law requires a machine recount when the margin is half a percentage point or less.
At an emergency hearing Monday morning, U.S. District Judge David S. Leibowitz denied Rodriguez’s request to remove Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Alina García from the board overseeing the recount. In a lawsuit filed Friday, Rodriguez alleged that Salazar’s recount attorney, Robert Fernández, is García’s son-in-law, and described García as Salazar’s “political ally” and friend.
The lawsuit cites a Miami Herald story quoting García as saying on election night, “Maria Elvira is the winner, with or without a recount.”
“This is a really dumb statement to make, even in part,” Leibowitz said. But he found the evidence insufficient to remove García.
García has denied any conflict of interest. The recount began around 10 a.m. Monday.
Aides to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are circulating a four-page set of talking points to allies that encourages them to defend the Pentagon chief’s record as he faces an impending impeachment vote.
The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, characterizes the impeachment effort as a “politicized spectacle.” It urges Republicans to fight back “while we still hold the trifecta,” an apparent reference to the GOP’s control, for now, of the White House and both chambers of Congress.
The impeachment effort is led by a Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who alleges, among other things, that Hegseth violated the 1973 War Powers Act by waging war in Iran without the consent of Congress and continued the conflict despite lawmakers’ vote to terminate it.
The talking points defend not only the war in Iran but also the Trump administration’s deadly military campaign against suspected drug traffickers in Latin America and its strikes in Yemen, and suggest that impeaching Hegseth “weakens America on the world stage.”
The document calls Massie, who is expected to file his articles of impeachment later Monday, a “rogue legislator” and the impeachment an attempt at “settling political scores.” A House vote on the impeachment articles could happen as soon as Wednesday.
Massie told The Post in a recent interview that he believes there is a “decent chance” the initiative will pass the House and become a “stain” on Hegseth’s record. “If he’s contemplating leaving,” the congressman said, “this would be a good time to do it.”
Pentagon deputy press secretary Joel Valdez said Hegseth and his team are “taking the offensive, and we will continue aggressively equipping the American people and our supporters with the unvarnished truth” to defend him against the impeachment effort.
Circulation of the talking points follows the Pentagon’s release last week of an almost six-minute video in which Hegseth denounces the impeachment push and touts his record since becoming defense secretary in January 2025. On Tuesday, Hegseth also plans to hold his first press briefing since May.
Two former administration officials who spoke to The Post said that, based on conversations they continue to have with senior Trump personnel, there is not an appetite inside the White House for a prolonged defense of Hegseth. They said it’s telling that Trump so far has not attacked the impeachment process and seems to be sitting back to let it play out.
Noah Robertson contributed to this report.
Lawmakers are back in Congress on Monday for the first time since Republicans received a shellacking in the midterm elections.
Here’s what to expect this week on Capitol Hill, as the GOP attempts to carry out as much of President Donald Trump’s agenda as it can before Democrats take over the House and the Senate in January.
Among other things, congressional Republicans hope to send the Pentagon more money, advance some long-stagnating permitting changes, and avert a government shutdown before the year is over.
But, first, the House must contend with an effort by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the war with Iran. Massie filed his resolution on Monday. Votes to impeach Hegseth could take place as late as Wednesday, or House Republicans could punt the effort by referring the resolution to the House Judiciary Committee or voting to table it.
Also, Republicans in both chambers will elect their leadership for the next Congress on Tuesday.
In the House, two longtime rivals — Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — are vying to take over from Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), who said last week that he would not seek to stay on as minority leader.
In the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) will run for minority leader.
And amid all this activity, dozens of newly elected lawmakers will be attending freshman orientation events in and around the U.S. Capitol for the next two weeks.
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Nearly a week after Democrats decisively took back the House and Senate majorities in the midterms, President Donald Trump is casting doubt on the results.
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” Trump wrote in a social media post Monday. “Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote.” Public polls did, in fact, predict widespread Democratic victories, although, on average, they underestimated the size of the sweep.
“It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!” Trump added, suggesting without evidence that there was something wrong with the machines people used to cast their ballots.
For years, Trump has made baseless claims about elections being rigged if they did not go in his favor. In the midterm elections, voters in nearly every demographic group swung to the left. In Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, the Democratic Senate candidates would have won based on their early and mail-in vote totals alone, a fact that Trump tried to cast as suspicious in his social media post.
Last week, in the immediate aftermath of the midterms, Trump did not question the integrity of the election, acknowledging that it had been a poor night for Republicans but saying that was because he had not been on the ballot.
Beginning next season, college football will look even less like college football. The College Football Playoff, along with its broadcaster, ESPN, said Monday morning that the postseason field will double from 12 to 24 teams. (Two seasons ago, that number was four.)
To accommodate the expanded calendar, the regular season will start a week earlier and end on Thanksgiving weekend, and the Power 4 conference championships will be eliminated. Teams will have the first weekend of December off, and the playoff will begin the next weekend.
The move further reduces the importance of the regular season, once a hallmark of the sport. For most of history, when two undefeated teams met in Week 6, the winner controlled its own destiny and the loser knew its season might be over. Now they will both probably make the playoff field.
ESPN reported that ESPN, which is already paying about $1.3 billion per year to air the 12-team tournament, will pay another $1.7 billion over five years for the additional games.
The only known handwritten final draft of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech will be publicly displayed for the first time later this month and sold at auction in January.
The draft was kept by King’s head of public relations, Edward T. Clayton, said Christie’s, the auction house that will facilitate the sale. Clayton’s widow first found the draft in the late 1990s but put it back into her late husband’s desk, not knowing it was the only known handwritten final draft. She rediscovered the draft in 2024.
The auction house expects the document to sell for upward of $10 million.
King worked on the speech at Washington’s Willard Hotel, which is less than a mile from the National Mall, where he delivered the historic address. An estimated crowd of 250,000 people had descended on the nation’s capital to march for civil rights.
The draft is seven pages long. An image of it published by Christie’s shows the speech scrawled in blue ink, littered with scratch-outs and other edits.
The draft will be displayed at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta from Nov. 16 to 22. It will be displayed again in Chicago and then at Christie’s in New York from Jan. 15, King’s birthday, to Jan. 21. It will be sold Jan. 22.
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