White House officials are signaling that President Joe Biden will not imminently move to block Nippon Steel’s bid to acquire U.S. Steel amid mounting concerns over the political and economic consequences of nixing the deal, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The White House last week had been preparing to announce that the president would formally block the Japanese company’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel on national security grounds. But after vocal opposition to the idea, White House officials have now indicated that such a decision is unlikely in the short term and may not be made until after the 2024 presidential election, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential conversations.

The president remains opposed to the deal, officials said. No announcement was ever scheduled. But the pace of internal deliberations has slowed.

White House spokeswoman Saloni Sharma disputed that there had been a change of plans, saying an announcement was never imminent and that the president remains committed to waiting for a recommendation from an interagency review board, as the law requires.

The delay of any announcement, however, comes as investors, Pennsylvania Democrats and some members of the steelworkers’ union warned that the deal’s collapse could spark an economic calamity for Pennsylvania’s beleaguered steel belt.

Shares of U.S. Steel have risen by more than 12 percent over the past two days of trading, as investors grew more optimistic that the deal would survive.

“People certainly don’t think we’re where we were Tuesday of last week. Everybody was like: ‘We’re dead. It’s over. We’re done.’ There’s definitely a sense we’ll probably get a chance to fight til November 5th. What happens Nov. 6 is still up in the air,” said one U.S. Steel shareholder, who supports the merger and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a politically controversial subject.

The United Steelworkers union, which endorsed Biden for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in her presidential bid, has opposed the transaction from the outset.

White House officials have said they are waiting for a recommendation from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the interagency board that reviews foreign transactions for national security implications. The panel is chaired by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and includes six other Biden cabinet secretaries as well as other political appointees who take direction from the president.

Since March, Biden has publicly opposed U.S. Steel being owned by a foreign firm.

“The president’s position is that it is vital for US Steel to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated. The President told our steelworkers he has their backs, and he meant it,” Sharma said in a written reply. “As we made clear last week, we have not received any recommendation from CFIUS.”

The proposed corporate acquisition has assumed outsize importance given its potential political impact on the 2024 election.

Biden’s opposition to Nippon Steel’s acquisition of the once-iconic U.S. Steel aligned with the position of the United Steelworkers union. David McCall, president of the labor organization, has described the deal as a threat to his members’ long-term job prospects and pension security.

But a move that the White House may have hoped would bolster its chances of winning Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes has instead triggered significant opposition among Democrats in western Pennsylvania’s steel belt.

“The White House was prepared to act precipitously and I think they were surprised by the pushback they got from all quarters,” said one person close to the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

On Thursday, USW leadership told its members that Nippon Steel would favor U.S. Steel’s nonunion operations in Arkansas rather than its unionized workforce that operates Pennsylvania’s traditional blast furnaces.

But in towns near Pittsburgh, many steelworkers and their neighbors were upset by word of the president’s apparent plan to kill the deal, which they see as the best chance for U.S. Steel’s outdated mills to survive.

“Nobody from his administration, or any of the administrations, have bothered to come to talk to the workers, the ones that are going to be affected by this,” said Democrat Chris Kelly, mayor of West Mifflin, Pa., home to one of the U.S. Steel facilities that Nippon Steel has pledged to modernize.

Without Nippon Steel’s cash, U.S. Steel has warned that it might close some of its aging facilities in the Mon Valley. The loss of such an important corporate employer and taxpayer would result in tax increases on other businesses or a reduction in public services, he said.

“Everybody in the country is not one issue. But when you’re at a swing state, right now the biggest issue in this state is U.S. Steel. It could cost the election in Pennsylvania,” Kelly said.

The company’s share price plummeted Sept. 4 in the wake of news reports that Biden had decided to kill the Nippon Steel takeover. U.S. Steel stock lost roughly a quarter of its value that day in 30 minutes of trading as investors absorbed the news.

Over the past week, the White House heard from business community representatives and the Japanese government about the likely negative fallout from the president’s decision to quash the deal. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and his team have also been in communication with the administration, and “his top priority has been protecting Pennsylvania workers,” said Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for the governor.

In the Mon Valley, a few miles southeast of Pittsburgh, the company’s steelmaking heritage dates to 1901. Nippon Steel has promised to spend $1 billion updating the facilities there, including by replacing a mill that produces steel to make automobiles and appliances.

“This deal is very important to the community. There’s a big disconnect between local elected officials here and what seems to be our federal representatives,” said Republican Sam DeMarco, an at-large councilman in Allegheny County, home to the steelmaker’s Mon Valley Works.

About 11,500 local residents either work for U.S. Steel or for local businesses that depend on its plants, he said.

“It would be devastating to see them leave,” DeMarco said.

U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt warned on Sept. 4 that there would be “unavoidable consequences” if Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion bid collapsed. “Thousands of good-paying union jobs” would be in danger, according to a company statement.

Also at stake are $2.7 billion that the Japanese company has pledged to invest in U.S. Steel’s aging facilities as well as the company’s commitment to keeping its headquarters in Pittsburgh.

The business community also raised concerns this week about the president’s handling of the deal. In a Sept. 11 letter to Yellen, the CFIUS chair, seven business groups — six from the United States and one from Japan — complained that “political pressure” was corrupting the government’s review of the Nippon Steel deal.

If the U.S. routinely approved or rejected proposed investments by foreign companies on the basis of domestic political concerns, other countries would do the same to American businesses, said the letter from groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Global Business Alliance.

Entering 2024, the terrain that lay in front of former president Donald Trump offered two very different, overlapping paths. He had been charged with more than 90 criminal counts in four jurisdictions, his attorneys scrambling to figure out how to defuse as many of them as possible. But he was also the dominant front-runner in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, step one toward being elected president again — and the ability to stall or upend those indictments entirely.

Nine and a half months later, those paths look quite different. Trump is formally the Republican nominee and, despite his opponents replacing their nominee, has an even-odds chance of winning election in November. But most of the criminal threat he faced has already evaporated regardless.

On Thursday, the judge overseeing the case brought against Trump (and a number of his allies) in Fulton County, Ga., dismissed two more of the 13 charges Trump had originally faced. He’d already set aside three of those charges, meaning that the threat to the former president now centers on only eight criminal counts.

Those sit alongside the four charges filed against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith in D.C. Those charges faced their own challenges after the Supreme Court determined in July that Trump had broad immunity from prosecution for actions undertaken under the auspices of his presidential office. Smith filed a superseding (that is, replacement) indictment in late August, but Trump’s legal maneuvers have been effective in stalling a criminal trial in that case.

Those charges are also federal, meaning that, if reelected, Trump could have his Justice Department simply bring the prosecution to an end.

He could have had his administration do that for the federal charges brought against him in Florida, too, if Judge Aileen M. Cannon hadn’t already thrown them all out. Those charges, centered on his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, were generally seen as the biggest threat to Trump — until Cannon was tapped as the judge overseeing the case. Soon after the original indictment, Smith’s team obtained a superseding indictment that added charges related to an alleged effort to obstruct the investigation; those, too, have been dismissed.

That leaves the 34 charges brought against Trump in New York — charges that went to trial in April and resulted in criminal convictions across the board.

Far from being problematic for Trump, the New York charges have probably been beneficial to Trump, at least so far. After the indictment was obtained — the first to be brought against the former president — his position in the Republican primaries surged. He effectively cast the indictment as politically motivated in the eyes of Republican voters, both establishing that his eventual conviction would be seen as meritless but also coloring the subsequent indictments in the same way.

Those charges do mean that Trump will at some point face criminal sanction (assuming that his efforts to have the conviction thrown out aren’t successful), which poses an obvious risk. But he has been able to have sentencing delayed until after the election, meaning that, again, he may be able to address the question of punishment from the elevated platform of the presidency.

None of this is how Trump’s critics hoped the situation would play out. There was an ongoing assumption — or perhaps hope — that the criminal charges or any convictions would hobble Trump, reducing the odds that he would win the White House again. (Trump likes to present this assumption as the predicate for the charges, a claim for which there’s no evidence.) That clearly hasn’t happened. It is unlikely that will change; with less than two months until Election Day, the charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 results — those in D.C. and Georgia — will not be tried.

From the outset, Trump’s political fate was intertwined with his legal one. Winning the presidency wasn’t just an ego boost, it was a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. But thanks in part to the slow workings of the justice system and thanks in part to (obviously sympathetic) judges in Florida and at the Supreme Court, the legal landscape is already very different — even before the election arrives.

President Joe Biden lashed out Friday at former president Donald Trump for his comments about a Springfield, Ohio, community that has seen an influx of Haitian migrants.

“I want to take a moment to say something [about the] Haitian American community that’s under attack in our country right now,” Biden said during a White House event celebrating Black Excellence. “It’s simply wrong. There’s no place in America. This has to stop, what he’s doing. It has to stop!”

His remarks came several moments after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke, referencing her heritage as a Haitian American.

Speaking as “the first Black, openly queer White House press secretary and, I’ve got to add, a proud Haitian American,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden: “I can tell you, representation matters to him. Our voices matter to him, our perspectives matter to him and our success and our community matters to him.”

The city, about 25 miles east of Dayton, was thrust into the national spotlight this week when Trump, at Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, amplified racist and xenophobic conspiracy theories about Haitian migrants, claiming that they were abducting people’s pet dogs and cats and eating them.

Members of the Haitian community in Springfield are there legally and have been granted temporary protected status in the United States after fleeing profound unrest and violence in their home country.

The rhetoric has escalated, and numerous buildings in Springfield — including its City Hall and an elementary school — were evacuated Thursday due to a bomb threat that included “hateful language” about the city’s immigrant population.

On Friday, two elementary schools were evacuated based on information received by the Springfield Police Division, the Columbus Dispatch reported. The Springfield City School District did not immediately return a voice message seeking comment.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), doubled down on his criticism of migrants Friday.

Without citing evidence, Vance wrote on X: “In Springfield, Ohio, there has been a massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates, and crime. This is what happens when you drop 20,000 people into a small community.”

Vance went on to charge that the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, “aims to do this to every town in our country.”

A spokesman for Vance told The Washington Post that he would provide evidence for the senator’s claims but did not say when.

On Tuesday, Vance conceded on X, “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” before he went on to claim inaccurately that a Haitian migrant “murdered” a child in the city last year. The boy’s grieving father said Tuesday night the death of his son, Aiden Clark, was the result of an accident, and he has demanded an apology from Vance and others who have falsely described it. The 11-year-old was killed last year when the school bus he was riding in was hit by a vehicle driven by a Haitian immigrant who did not have a license.

“Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose,” Nathan Clark said at a public meeting Tuesday. He later named Vance, Trump and other politicians. “They have spoken my son’s name and use his death for political gain. This needs to stop now,” he said.

Officials in Springfield and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) have said the rumors of pet-eating migrants are unfounded.

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — On the eve of her debate with Donald Trump, Kamala Harris’s advisers were anxious. Within a deeply calcified electorate, her poll numbers appeared to be plateauing. She was facing one of the most experienced presidential debaters in history. Beltway pundits were questioning whether her initial burst of momentum was evaporating.

But the vice president’s aggressive performance in Philadelphia electrified her grassroots supporters and helped her notch the coveted endorsement of Taylor Swift as she raised an eye-popping $47 million in the 24 hours after the debate.

Her fans filled arenas in Greensboro and Charlotte, N.C., where they queued up outside for hours before she arrived Thursday — shimmying to the hip-hop beats of a DJ near the magnetometers and donning bright green stickers bearing Harris’s shorthand for turning the page on the Trump era: “We’re not going back.”

As Harris focused this week on expanding her potential paths to victory in November — targeting North Carolina, where Barack Obama was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in 2008 — the first post-debate poll suggested a small but potentially promising post-debate bounce.

Still, in every speech since Tuesday’s faceoff, the vice president has warned her supporters that the race will remain close until the final days. She and her advisers have repeatedly outlined the hurdles for Democrats — from Republican efforts to restrict the counting of certain ballots to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Trump-aligned super PACs plan to spend trying to define Harris in the most negative light.

With early voting slated to begin within days, Harris has toggled this week between events aimed at activating her core supporters — including Black voters in Charlotte and Greensboro — and a push to drive up her margins in tougher territory for Democrats such as Johnstown, Pa., a tiny blue dot in western Pennsylvania surrounded by redder areas that have favored Trump in recent elections.

“We know ours will be a very tight race until the very end. We are the underdog. Let’s be clear about that,” Harris said in Greensboro. “We have hard work ahead of us, but we like hard work. Hard work is good work.”

Headed into the debate, polls showed a dead even race between Harris and Trump. But a post-debate poll from Reuters/Ipsos showed Harris leading Trump among registered voters 47 percent to 42 percent. About 49 percent of respondents said Harris “seemed like someone who would listen to me and understand my concerns,” compared to just 18 percent who viewed Trump that way. (The poll’s margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points for registered voters).

The Harris campaign sees that theme as a critical avenue for persuading voters who still don’t know much about the vice president or are just tuning into the election. In the debate, in speeches and ads this week, the Harris campaign has been trying to drive the message that the vice president would strive to be a president for all Americans while casting Trump as out for himself.

Her newest ad Friday featured lines from her debate closing statement where she told viewers that during her career as a prosecutor, she never asked a victim or a witness whether they were a Republican or a Democrat. “The only think I ever asked them: ‘Are you okay?’ ” she says in the featured clip. “’That’s the kind of president we need right now. Someone who cares about you and is not putting themselves first.’”

Harris will drive that same message Friday as she tries to reach the many blue-collar voters who have favored Republicans in recent years, with visits to Johnstown — where she is meeting privately with union leaders — and Wilkes-Barre, a former coal town with a heavy union presence in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County.

Obama won Luzerne County by 9 points in 2012, but Trump then claimed victory in the county with a nearly 20-point margin. Obama similarly narrowly won Cambria County in southwestern Pennsylvania in 2008 after campaigning in Johnstown with the message that special interests and lobbyists in Washington “aren’t looking out for you.” Eight years later, Trump crushed Hillary Clinton there.

On the trail, Harris has been feeding off the energy of her crowd as she highlights some of her stronger moments during the debate. In Charlotte, as she delved into Trump’s answer on whether he had a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, some in the crowd interrupted her by shouting “Concepts! Concepts!”

“Oh, you all you watched the debate?” Harris said with a laugh to uproarious applause. “Concepts. Concepts. No actual plan — concepts,” she continued. “Understand what’s at stake on that. Forty-five million Americans are insured through the Affordable Care Act and he’s going to end it based on a concept.”

She also noted that Trump dodged a question about whether he’d sign a national abortion ban.

“Donald Trump refused to say that he would veto a national abortion ban. You remember that?” Harris asked. “He refused to answer that question, refused to answer that question. Well, I’m gonna tell you, when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly, proudly sign it into law.”

Harris’s ready supply of cash has allowed her campaign to be nimble on the airwaves. Since her unexpected entrance into the race July 21, Harris’s effort has proved to be a fundraising juggernaut.

The $47 million that she raised in the 24 hours after the debate followed the news that her campaign raised $361 million in August, according to aides. That was nearly three times as much as the $130 million brought in by Trump’s coordinated effort.

Harris’s campaign said it entered September with $404 million in cash to spend compared with $295 million in cash for the Trump campaign.

But Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris-Walz campaign chair, wrote in a recent memo obtained by The Post that Democrats are facing structural hurdles that “will require us to continue aggressively raising money.”

She argued that the electoral college map this cycle benefits the Republican ticket that predicted the margins will be “razor-thin” in the battleground states.

“Every single battleground state is close, so we need to compete aggressively in every state in order to build a pathway to 270 electoral votes,” O’Malley Dillon wrote. “Playing in every battleground requires significant resources — for offices, organizers, TV ads, and other investments that keep these states in play.”

She argued that high-dollar donors such as Timothy Mellon will continue to seed pro-Trump super PACs with hundreds of millions of dollars that will be devoted, in part, to attacking Harris on the airwaves.

“New, billionaire-funded soft money groups are springing up at a rapid pace,” she wrote. “We have to keep our foot on the gas.”

Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.

From quite literally the moment Donald Trump descended on the country’s presidential campaigns in 2015, he has made misinformation and demagoguery about migrant crime his political calling card.

But even in that context, Trump’s comments about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, purportedly eating pets break ground.

Relying on little more than the thinnest of rumors — and despite his claim being debunked to his face as tens of millions of Americans watched during Tuesday’s presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris — Trump has continued to train a spotlight on a very specific group of people in a very specific place. And he has declined to back down despite threats on Springfield’s city hall, a school and other buildings. Trump on Friday even pledged a mass deportation operation in Springfield, despite the Haitian immigrants being there legally.

Given the laughingstock this has become and the ugly concoction that is apparently brewing in Springfield, it’s worth asking: Why? It’s one thing to demagogue an issue; it’s another to do so in such a ridiculous and potentially dangerous way.

The apparent reason for the continued gambit is that it focuses attention on the issue Trump views as his political silver bullet: migrant crime. Springfield is, after all, a town that has recently seen a large influx of Haitian immigrants. If Trump’s version of events caught on, it could be employed as shorthand to justify his migrant crime strategy. And we’ve seen how Trump’s misinformation can catch on, despite all the fact-checking — at least with his devoted supporters.

But it’s not at all evident that this is nearly the electoral winner Trump seems to think it is. Besides the significant moral concerns, the downside is that Trump could undercut the entire enterprise by making a claim that is specific and debunkable enough to give lie to the rest of his migrant-crime rhetoric — at least with middle-of-the-road voters.

It’s been evident for a while that this is more than Trump repeating a rumor. It’s a campaign strategy. The strategy didn’t start with Trump, after all. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), first posted about it on Monday. (Vance before Tuesday’s debate conceded that the rumors might be wrong, just hours before Trump stated them as fact.)

It also flows from plenty of things Trump has said before.

This is a former president who, after all, effectively launched his political career by falsely casting Barack Obama as lying about his foreign birth. Trump launched his 2016 campaign by claiming Mexico was sending drugs, rapists and criminals across the U.S.-Mexico border. (“And some, I assume, are good people,” he added, suggesting those “good people” were a relatively small share.)

Trump has also targeted Haitians for particular derision, reportedly saying they “all have AIDS” and asking why we allow immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti. As the 2024 campaign has worn on, Trump has cast immigrants as a criminal scourge on our country — even as the evidence shows they commit less crime than native-born Americans.

Despite this long history, it’s not at all clear the approach has paid electoral dividends.

Yes, Trump won the 2016 election while playing up his border wall, but he also faced one of the most unpopular opponents in modern history, in Hillary Clinton. And every major election since then has proved disappointing for the GOP — including in 2022, when Republicans keyed on a border surge and crime as their potential game changers. (The president’s party almost always loses substantial ground in midterm elections, but Democrats had a historically good election against that backdrop.)

Just because Republicans didn’t win doesn’t mean these issues didn’t assist them. But there is little evidence that migrant crime is a pervasive concern for Americans.

There is no question that anti-immigrant sentiment surged amid record-setting illegal border crossings in recent years. Gallup data has shown a significant rise in the percentage of Americans who want immigration decreased. And as of June last year, 47 percent of Americans said migrants were making crime worse, vs. just 5 percent who said they were making it better.

But 47 percent isn’t a majority. And other data — while limited — suggests this isn’t a huge point of emphasis for Americans:

• A late 2022 PRRI poll showed only around one-third of Americans agreed at least “somewhat” with the idea that immigrants were increasing crime in local communities.
• A May Reuters-Ipsos poll showed just 22 percent said immigrants were more likely to be criminals than people born in the United States.
• And a March AP-NORC poll showed nearly 6 in 10 Americans said the risk of migrant crime was “minor” or “not a risk at all.” And just 3 in 10 thought immigrants were having any kind of “major impact” on their own communities — a number that suggests this might not be a top-tier personal concern even for many of those worried about it.

There’s also the fact that illegal border crossings have dropped sharply in recent months, to four-year lows, perhaps reducing the import of the broader issue.

That doesn’t mean these numbers won’t rise as Trump focuses like a laser on this issue. But it doesn’t exactly suggest this is a sleeping electoral giant of an issue, either.

It’s just as possible that Trump is running out of ideas, and so his strategy is to go back to the well, up the ante and the misinformation, and hope it turns out better for his party than it has before.

The potential downside is that the many Americans who aren’t predisposed to Trump’s version of migrant crime could see Trump’s misinformation for what it is and dismiss the rest of what he says about the subject.

And all the while, Springfield twists in the wind.

A Secret Service investigation has confirmed security breakdowns that paved the way for an attempted assassination of Donald Trump, while also revealing new information — including that agents never directed local police to secure the roof of the building used by the gunman, according to two senior government officials familiar with the probe.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe an internal probe, said the investigation found that agents from Secret Service headquarters and the Pittsburgh field office had an alarmingly slipshod strategy to block a potential shooter from having a clear sight of the Republican nominee for president at the July 13 rally in Butler, Pa.

Agents securing the event had discussed possibly using heavy equipment and flags to create a visual impediment between the Agr International building and the rally stage, the officials said. But supervisors who arrived at Butler the day of the rally found cranes, trucks and flags were not deployed in a way that blocked the line of sight from that roof.

Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to climb atop the building and open fire on Trump, wounding his ear, critically injuring two other people and killing one spectator before being fatally shot by a Secret Service sniper.

The internal probe, known as a Mission Assurance investigation, is typically used to improve security practices.

The Butler investigation found significant weaknesses in the Secret Service’s standard communication system for events where political candidates appear. Unlike for appearances by the president or vice president, the Secret Service uses a command post separate from local police assigned to the event.

In Butler, the investigation found that:

• A Secret Service radio room where agents were supposed to monitor potential threats and get reports of any problems had no way to receive real-time alerts from local police surveilling the crowd and outer perimeter.
• Local police’s alert of a suspicious man at the rally before Trump’s arrival was not broadcast widely on Secret Service radio. Instead, local counter snipers were instructed to text a photo of the man — who was behaving oddly near the Agr building and carrying a range finder — to just one Secret Service official, limiting the agency’s awareness of a man who turned out to be the gunman.
• Secret Service agents never heard local police radio traffic about trying to track down and then spotting that man after Trump began speaking.

The report also found the protective operations office of the Secret Service was slow to beef up security for Trump as he began campaigning, even after the agency obtained intelligence indicating that there was an Iranian state plot to kill or harm political candidates.

Secret Service acting director Ron Rowe testified to Congress at the end of July that he was embarrassed by the security lapses he had learned about in Butler and pledged the internal review would help strengthen the agency’s mission going forward.

The findings of that review may be released to the public next week, the government officials said. Rowe shared a summary in private briefings with the Senate Homeland Security Committee and a House investigative task force Thursday and said he has ordered a number of changes in security plans to address these gaps, one of the officials said.

For example, the agency now co-locates Secret Service agents and local police in the same command center for public appearances of the presidential candidates, the official said.

“I think the American people are going to be shocked, astonished, and appalled by what we will report to them about the failures by the Secret Service in this assassination attempt on the former president,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, told Fox News after Thursday’s briefing.

The investigation corroborates several earlier reports from The Washington Post and other news organizations. The Post reported that police in Butler County warned the Secret Service in the hours before the rally that they would not be able to post a patrol car next to the Agr building, but Secret Service agents gave them no other instructions to secure the building. The Post also reported that the separation of the Secret Service radio room and local police command post meant local police concerns about Crooks were not widely shared.

Ahead of the public release of the report’s findings, several senior Secret Service agents are announcing their retirements. Mike Plati, assistant director of the Office of Protective Operations, resigned effective Friday, the Secret Service confirmed in a statement.

Also imminently retiring is John Buckley, a senior executive who helps oversee the office that decides what assets to devote to secure public events, according to an email sent to Secret Service staff Friday and reviewed by The Post. A senior agent in the Pittsburgh field office, which crafted the security plan, also has indicated his plans to retire, one of the officials familiar with the investigation said.

Kimberly Cheatle, a veteran agent, resigned as director of the agency days after the shooting amid bipartisan calls for her to step down. She had faced criticism for not providing details about the investigation in the immediate aftermath of the attack and for saying she wanted to wait until the 60-day review was completed.

In response to questions about the report, Rowe said in a statement that he has begun an agency-wide review to harden the protective bubble around the more than 40 government officials and family members the Secret Service protects. He warned that beefing up this security will cost money.

“The Secret Service cannot operate under the paradox of ‘zero fail mission’ while also making our special agents and uniformed division officers execute a very critical national security mission by doing more with less,” Rowe said.

Though the Secret Service took responsibility for the security failures soon after the Trump rally shooting, the aftermath was filled with bitter recriminations and confusion over whether the service or local law enforcement was responsible for allowing Crooks to access the roof just 150 yards from where Trump was speaking. The failures have drawn bipartisan condemnation from lawmakers investigating the matter.

The attack revealed years of conflicts between the former president and the Secret Service over the level of his protection. Trump’s aides have said the Secret Service rebuffed their efforts over the past several years to enhance his security but significantly expanded his protection and equipment after the assassination attempt, with far more snipers agents and closures around him.

Aides to Trump said last month that they had sometimes canceled or postponed events over concerns that security was insufficient.

Days before the Butler rally, the FBI arrested a Pakistani national for allegedly taking part in a plot on behalf of Iran to kill a politician or government official on U.S. soil, raising worries about Trump’s safety.

Trump and his team were told there was a security issue, but not that it was related to Iran, said a person familiar with the situation who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that has not been made public. Because of the threat, the campaign believed there was more security at the Butler rally and an event a few days earlier in Doral, Fla.

The FBI is leading the investigation into the July 13 shooting, but several other inquiries are pending, including in Congress and the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. A report is also due in early October by an independent panel commissioned by the DHS to examine the attack.

Josh Dawsey and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.

Former president Donald Trump pitched yet another idea meant to win over hourly workers that surprised his own advisers: Stop taxing overtime.

“We will end all taxes on overtime. You know what that means?” he said Thursday during a campaign stop in Arizona. “That gives people more of an incentive to work. It gives the companies, it’s a lot easier to get the people. … It would be unbelievable. You’ll get a whole new workforce by doing no taxes on overtime.”

Though no details were provided, the proposal marks the Republican presidential nominee’s latest overture to low- and middle-income voters. Last month, he called on the federal government to carve out similar exemptions on tip earnings and on Social Security payments, regardless of income level.

On Friday, economists questioned how it would work.

“If you did not put any guardrails on this, it would be a huge revenue loser,” said Brendan Duke, senior director for economic policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Such a shift, he said, could lead employers to classify as much of a worker’s wages as overtime as possible. “As long as you’re not violating the federal minimum wage or the state minimum wage, it’s off to the races.”

One of Trump’s economic advisers, Stephen Moore, said the announcement came as a surprise. To his knowledge, he said, the former president has not hammered out any of the details. “This is an idea that Trump came up with himself, just like not taxing tips,” Moore said. “It’s a way to help working-class folks. … If you’re putting in more than 40 hours, you should be rewarded for it and not taxed for it.”

As for how much it would cost, Moore said, “We’re going to start trying to determine that. … I don’t think it would be hugely expensive, but I don’t have a good estimate.”

Such a plan probably would require an act of Congress, and Moore said he believed Trump probably would favor a law in which overtime pay was exempt from income tax but still subject to payroll taxes, so that employees would still pay into Social Security and Medicare based on total wages including overtime pay.

While Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, echoed his call to exempt tips from taxes, a spokesperson for her campaign blasted the no-tax-on-overtime proposal as Trump’s “latest snake oil sales pitch.”

“He is desperate and scrambling and saying whatever it takes to try to trick people into voting for him,” Joseph Costello said in a statement. “If he takes power again, he will only look out for himself and his billionaire buddies and their big corporations.”

The Fair Labor Standards Act lays out detailed rules for workers who must receive overtime pay — many hourly workers are included, while many other workers like executives, teachers, babysitters and some elder-care workers are not. The law goes into great and sometimes unexpected detail — movie theater workers, for instance, are not required to be paid overtime.

Once covered employees exceed 40 hours a week, the law requires their companies to pay them at least 1½ times their normal pay for any further hours they work. Democrats and Republicans have gone back and forth on which workers should qualify for overtime, with Trump favoring overtime guarantees for 4 million fewer workers during his presidency than a plan favored by former president Barack Obama.

Last year, Alabama became the first state to pass legislation exempting overtime wages from state income taxes. The bill was proposed by a Democrat and supported by Republicans, and the reprieve is currently in effect as an 18-month trial that ends next June. Similar measures have been introduced in several other statehouses.

Economists raised concerns that Trump’s proposal might distort how workers report their income. People who are currently salaried could press their employers to reclassify them as hourly workers, for instance. Employers could reduce their workers’ base pay but greatly raise their overtime pay.

“You can game the system here pretty easily,” said Rajesh Nayak, a former assistant secretary for policy at the Labor Department. “CEOs can get a base pay and get most of their pay in overtime, then suddenly they don’t have to pay taxes on that.”

Others wondered why an hourly worker should pay less in taxes than a salaried worker with comparable annual pay.

“Workers making the same income ought to be taxed the same way. It’s true whether it’s tips. It’s true whether it’s overtime. As policy, it fails the equity test. And I have no idea what it’s going to cost, but the cost will not be trivial,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. “You’re going to want to maximize your overtime pay because it’s tax-free and minimize your regular pay.”

While experts have not yet run the numbers on the concept of exempting all overtime from taxes, analysts have said that Trump’s no-tax-on-tips idea could cost the government at least $10 billion a year. Exempting Social Security could cost more than 10 times as much and accelerate the depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund.

Trump pitched the newest idea at his rally Thursday as a boon to deserving groups of workers.

“The people who work overtime are among the hardest-working citizens in our country, and for too long, no one in Washington has been looking out for them,” he said to cheers. “They’re police officers, nurses, factory workers, construction workers, truck drivers and machine operators. It’s time for the working man and woman to finally catch a break, and that’s what we’re doing, because this is a good one.”

He sought the crowd’s approval. “If you are an overtime worker, when you’re past 40 hours a week, think of that: Your overtime hours will be tax-free. Okay? Good? You’re going to have it.”

A former Arlington County Fire Department employee was arrested Friday in West Virginia on charges of assaulting police and rioting in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, accused of joining a charge that overran a key police line and led to the breach of the building, according to court records.

Brian Holmes, a West Virginia resident, was employed for about a year or more with the department, according to two department witnesses cited in an FBI arrest affidavit. On Jan. 6, wearing red sneakers, a gray Virginia Tech hoodie and hard-knuckle gloves, Holmes allegedly assaulted two officers guarding a stairway leading up from the lower West Terrace just as they were bowled over by Florida Proud Boys member Daniel Scott, court records said.

Prosecutors have said the breakthrough helped the mob access a level through which the Capitol was first breached 20 minutes later, forcing the evacuation of Congress and delaying a joint session meeting to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory over Donald Trump.

“Holmes can be seen grabbing Officer CC as he was being pulled toward the crowd,” the arrest affidavit alleged. He appeared to taunt police and gestured rioters behind him to follow him, the FBI alleged.

“Y’all asked for this, you know that right,” the FBI quoted Holmes as saying. “Y’all gonna have a long day, y’all gonna have a long … day,” Holmes added, and “Are you ready to speak Chinese? … Because that’s what’s going to happen, that’s what’s going to happen if you let these [expletives] steal this election.”

Holmes was arrested in Martinsburg, W.Va., and appeared before a U.S. magistrate judge Friday on an arrest warrant issued Aug. 23 in D.C., according to court records.

In a written statement released by Holmes attorney Stanley Woodward, Holmes denied the allegations and said he had immediately advised his department supervisor of his presence at the rally, and resigned after being contacted by law enforcement “so as to avoid being a distraction from the Department’s critical mission. I am proud to have served more than six years among Arlington’s bravest.”

As of April 2023, Holmes was no longer employed by the Arlington Fire Department, a spokesman said. “When made aware of the allegations, the ACFD cooperated fully with investigators,” Capt. Nathaniel C. Hiner said in a statement, referring questions about the case to the FBI.

President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met at the White House on Friday amid rising tensions with Russia, reaffirming their support for Ukraine but declining to publicly address urgent questions over whether Biden will pave the way for Ukraine to use Western-made weapons to strike deeper inside Russia.

“The United States is committed to standing with you to help Ukraine as it defends against Russia’s onslaught of aggression,” Biden told Starmer at the outset of their meeting. “It’s clear that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will not prevail in this war. The people of Ukraine will prevail.”

Starmer said it was vital that the two allied nations work in tandem. “I think the next few weeks and months could be crucial, very, very important, that we support Ukraine in this vital war of freedom,” the prime minister said.

But the two leaders said little about the biggest questions hanging over their meeting: whether American allies such as Britain might allow Ukraine to use their weapons to attack military targets deep inside Russia. Putin this week warned sharply against such a move, raising the stakes for Biden’s decision on whether to support it and whether at some point to allow U.S.-made weapons to be used the same way.

Hours before the meeting at the White House, Putin accused six British diplomats of spying and announced it had stripped them of accreditation. Putin also threatened that if Ukraine were to fire Western missiles into Russia, he would treat it as an attack by NATO and would respond accordingly, a posture that threatened to escalate the war.

“If this decision is made, it will mean nothing other than the direct involvement of NATO states, European states, in the war in Ukraine,” Putin said in a television interview late Thursday.

Vasily Nebenzya, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, warned the U.N. Security Council on Friday about the use of Western weapons deep inside Russia. “The facts are that NATO will be a direct party to hostilities against a nuclear power,” Nebenzya said. “I think you shouldn’t forget about this and think about the consequences.”

From the outset of the war in February 2022, Biden has sought to balance his support for Ukraine with his desire to prevent the conflict from spiraling into a broader confrontation. With only four months left in office, Biden’s delicate decision-making on the war will increasingly play into a foreign policy legacy that is likely to revolve in large part on his handling of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

That task has meant dealing with a variety of foreign leaders. Starmer, who was elected prime minister only two months ago, arrived at the White House in a motorcade on Friday afternoon, and he and Biden entered the Oval Office for photos before meeting in the Blue Room for their extended strategy session.

Biden grew testy when a British reporter shouted a question, before the president could began speaking, about what he says in response to Putin’s threats. “I say, ‘You be quiet until I speak. Okay? That’s what I say,” he said.

Biden then welcomed Starmer to the White House and thanked him for his leadership in backing Ukraine. But he largely ignored shouted questions from reporters, saying at one point in response to a question about what he thinks of Putin, “I don’t think much about Vladimir Putin.”

The official White House summary of the meeting stressed the opposition of the American and British leaders to the support that some countries are giving Russia. “They expressed deep concern about Iran and North Korea’s provision of lethal weapons to Russia and … China’s support to Russia’s defense industrial base,” the statement said.

Russia has made threats against NATO when Western nations have ramped up their support for Ukraine, but he has generally failed to follow through. Starmer told British reporters ahead of his meeting with Biden that Ukraine had a right to defend itself against an illegal Russian invasion.

“We don’t seek any conflict with Russia. That’s not our intention in the slightest,” Starmer said. “But they started this conflict, and Ukraine’s got a right to self-defense.”

The British government also accused Russia of “a significant escalation” by imported ballistic weapons from Iran, saying that it was “bolstering Putin’s capability to continue his illegal war.”

Biden and Starmer were also expected to discuss tensions in the Middle East, focusing on attempts for a cease-fire deal and the release of hostages in Gaza. The British announced this month that they were suspending some arms exports to Israel, citing “a clear risk” that the arms might be used in “serious violation of international humanitarian law.’

Heading into the meeting, John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said that there would be little shift from the United States on allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia.

“There is no change to our view on the provision of long-range strike capabilities for Ukraine to use inside Russia, and I wouldn’t expect any sort of major announcement in that regard coming out of the discussions, certainly not on our side,” he said in a briefing with reporters.

Kirby declined to comment directly on whether the U.S. would signal support for allowing the British or French to authorize use of their weapons for such long-range attacks.

“We have, and will continue to have, meaningful conversations with our allies … about what we’re all doing to support Ukraine, about what can be done, what should be done, the pros and the cons of all these moves,” Kirby said.

Regarding Putin’s warnings about NATO, he said that “it’s hard to take anything coming out of Putin’s face at his word” but added that the U.S. carefully monitors any Russian threats.

“He starts brandishing the nuclear sword, yes, we constantly monitor that kind of activity,” Kirby said. “He obviously has proven capable of aggression. He has obviously proven capable of escalation over the last now going on three years.”

The meeting at the White House occurred after Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with British foreign secretary David Lammy on a recent trip to Kyiv, a joint visit in which they heard from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Zelensky has been pressing for months for Western leaders to lift restrictions against using long-range missiles to target military sites in Russia.

Biden was asked Tuesday whether the United States was ready to lift the restrictions. “We are working that out right now,” he said.

But administration officials said Friday that those reviews are still ongoing, with uncertainty over when or whether there might be any change in policy.

At the same time, some senior congressional leaders have been urging Biden to make such a shift, saying Ukraine needs a freer hand.

“In light of Putin’s increasingly horrific attacks on civilian targets, it’s time to lift restrictions on the use of long-range U.S.-provided weapons to allow Ukraine to reach high value Russian military targets,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said in a recent statement. “On the expectation that the Ukrainian government has demonstrated how these new authorities fit within its broader campaign strategy, I hope that the Biden Administration will swiftly grant these permissions to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”

Karen DeYoung and Missy Ryan contributed to this report.