Washington, DC

1. Crypto bill movement?
2. Housing deadline looms
3. Technical Iran talks
4. GOP defamation case
5. Lessons from Platner’s fall
6. US permitting obstacles
7. Africa lacks US envoys

PDB: Israel says uncovered new Iranian plot to kill Trump

SK Hynix makes Nasdaq debut … Spain faces Belgium in World Cup quarterfinals … NYT: Man killed by ICE agents in Houston was not intended target

Top Democrats slam Trump over crypto

The top Democrats on five Senate committees are rebuking President Donald Trump for making $1.3 billion off of cryptocurrency as lawmakers prepare to take up a long-awaited digital assets bill. “The disclosures heighten concerns about the president pushing Congress to pass crypto legislation in favor of the very industry he’s cashing in on,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Gary Peters, D-Mich., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., write in a statement shared first with Semafor. Senators are expected to release the text of the measure by Monday, people familiar with the talks said, despite multiple unresolved issues. In the House, GOP leaders are searching for ways to solve an impasse caused by hardliners who obstructed legislation in protest of the lack of progress on the SAVE Act voter ID legislation and border security bills.

— Nicholas Wu and Eleanor Mueller

Trump keeps allies guessing on housing

The 10-day deadline for the bipartisan housing bill is tonight, and Trump is keeping everyone guessing as to what he’ll do — by design. Trump did an about-face last month on the bipartisan bill, cancelling a signing ceremony and demanding that Congress pass his voter ID bill. Since then, the fate of the housing bill (which Trump has described as a “yawn”) has been uncertain; he’ll have to decide today whether to sign it, let it become law without his signature, or veto it. Nixing the bill would rob Republicans of a political win, and the prevailing theory is that Trump will simply quietly allow it to become law. But Trump is known to be unpredictable and has been cagey about his plans, telling reporters this week only that he’ll “make a decision” before pivoting to advocating for the SAVE Act.

— Shelby Talcott

Iran, US to hold ‘technical talks’

The US said it would hold “technical talks” with Iran despite the countries’ truce coming under huge pressure in recent days over their strikes against one another. Besides their attacks, the two sides remain far apart on the negotiating table with each holding what appear to be irreconcilable demands: Iran wants to control traffic through the Strait of Hormuz; Washington wants Tehran to give up its missile and proxy efforts. On one side, Trump’s potential White House successors are presenting differing paths forward, while Iran’s leadership is trying to rebuild domestic and international support. “There may well be more talks,” the historian Kim Ghattas wrote in the Financial Times, “but there will also be more strikes.”

WY candidate sues fellow Republicans

Reid Rasner, an openly gay Republican running for Wyoming’s sole House seat, is spending the final stretch of the campaign suing members of his own party for defamation. This morning, Rasner will settle one case against an Iowa man who called him a “pedophile” under several of his campaign’s Facebook posts, and he’s pursuing another case against a former GOP Wyoming state senator who he alleges led a whisper campaign accusing him of sexual misconduct. “This just isn’t the Wyoming I knew or thought I knew,” Rasner, a financial adviser, told Semafor’s David Weigel. Ross Hemminger, the president of the LGBTQ group Log Cabin Republicans, said the “pedophile” claims struck him as the sort of discriminatory rhetoric he thought both parties had moved past. “Reid is a very, very conservative person,” Hemminger said. “Policy-wise, he probably outflanks most people who hold office in Wyoming.”

Platner implosion a cautionary tale

The collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine carries an important lesson for campaign operatives looking for a diamond in the rough. Platner’s team did not fully vet the candidate, according to multiple reports, and his repeated assertions that nothing more untoward about his background would come out proved false. Platner’s former national finance director told The New York Times that his aides failed to “ask the right questions and get honest answers,” describing the campaign as a slow-motion crash: “It’s like we’ve been watching a mile-long train derail at four miles an hour,” he said. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported that the team that recruited Platner dismissed a 2024 Facebook post urging women not to date him that was written by the woman who would go on to accuse him of rape. Platner will exit the race officially on Monday, Axios reported.

Permitting is obstacle to energy buildout

Permitting — more than access to capital — is the main obstacle to building out the global energy system, the heads of the natural resources group at JP Morgan’s investment bank argue. The issue is “most acute” in the US, they write in an op-ed shared first with Semafor’s Prashant Rao, but can also be seen in lengthening construction timelines in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the UK. The ultimate result is “generation capacity not coming online, grid upgrades not being delivered, and industrial facilities not being built. All of these inefficiencies show up as higher costs, tighter supply, and reduced resilience when needs are skyrocketing.” In the piece, they make the case for permitting that features “enforceable schedules, concurrent rather than sequential reviews,” and judicial oversight that makes rulings “on a timeline that matches economic reality.”

US lacks scores of ambassadors in Africa

The US has left more than 40 African nations without a Senate-confirmed ambassador, hampering Washington’s efforts to engage in security and diplomatic missions across the continent. Some 41 African countries currently lack a confirmed envoy, including Nigeria, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, and Sudan. While there are vacancies across the diplomatic corps, the gap in Africa-specific posts is especially stark: It widened in December when the administration recalled more than a dozen career ambassadors from Africa, a move the American Foreign Service Association called “institutional sabotage.” The vacancies come as Washington negotiates high-stakes deals — like a US-brokered DRC-Rwanda peace agreement and a Libya peace deal — often through high-profile envoys like Trump’s Africa adviser, Massad Boulos, rather than resident ambassadors. “No matter how good [Boulos] is, he can’t be everywhere at once,” said Michelle Gavin, a former US ambassador to Botswana.

— Adrian Elimian

Debatable: AI and the economy

Artificial intelligence is already making its mark on the US economy as workers put new tools to use and planned initial public offerings power the stock market. One of the central questions vexing lawmakers, meanwhile, is what the technology’s eventual impact on the US jobs market will look like. Nearly one in five US employees believe the job they currently hold will be eliminated by AI within the next five years, according to Gallup. But the data has hardly been consistent, with some studies predicting job losses — especially entry-level — and others suggesting companies using AI are growing their workforce. “I still come down in the place that, in the end, AI is going to create more jobs,” former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., warned of scenarios in which “many millions” of job losses occur.

Katie Nolan is questioning where sports media is headed. On this week’s Mixed Signals, the sports media host and “Casuals” podcast creator sits down to talk about navigating two decades of upheaval in the industry. Max and Ben ask Katie why she turned down gambling advertising when it was everywhere, how politics keeps inserting itself into sports, and whether the window that opened for women in the space is closing again. They also get into call-in radio, hockey’s underrated chaos, and what it took for her to become a Jeopardy! champion.

Beltway Newsletters

Punchbowl News: Republicans secured more than $1 billion in earmarks in the House’s FY2027 defense policy bill while Democrats landed more than $389 million, an analysis of public requests showed.

Playbook: “This will be a one-week news story,” said Ro Khanna, D-Calif., of Graham Platner’s implosion.

Axios: Leading conservatives are headed to Utah this week to attend a hearing for the man accused of murdering Charlie Kirk, underscoring how the late Turning Point USA founder “remains a unifying figure across the Republican Party and the MAGA movement.”

White House