President Biden on Thursday awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to 17 people in a wide variety of endeavors, including gymnast Simone Biles, Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington and, posthumously, inventor Steve Jobs and former senator John McCain.

Biden’s list of recipients, his first as president, reflected his personal and political identity, ranging from a labor leader, the late AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, to a gun control activist, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. He named several Republicans known for working across the aisle, those who came from average backgrounds to do extraordinary things — and, in true Biden form, a Catholic nun.

“This,” Biden said at the conclusion of the event, “is America.”

Biden, a president who loves ceremonies — often relishing the moments when, as vice president, he swore in new U.S. senators — was in his element for the duration of the event. He smiled at the introduction of each guest, offering salutes and handshakes, kisses and hugs.

The honorees were a study in contrasts, a group that included Biles, 25, the most decorated U.S. gymnast in history, who has advocated for sexual assault victims, as well as former senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), 90, the sharp-tongued politician and governor’s son who served 18 years in the Senate.

Of Biles, Biden joked, “Today, she adds to her medal count of 32.”

Other honorees included Sister Simone Campbell, former director of Network, a Catholic social justice organization, who was instrumental in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010. Biden once joined her “Nuns on the Bus” tour.

“Sister Simone Campbell is a gift from God,” Biden said Thursday, taking the occasion to recall his meeting with Pope Benedict, who asked Biden for some advice. “It’d be presumptuous of me to give you advice, Your Holiness,” Biden recalled saying.

When the pope pressed further, Biden said he offered “one piece of advice … I’d go easy on the nuns. They’re more popular than you are.’” He joked, “The fact that six weeks later he retired, I don’t know if that had anything to do with it.”

The president also recognized Washington, an actor, director and producer who has served as national spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America for more than 25 years. Biden said Washington was unable to attend the event and would receive his award at a later date; a White House official later said Washington’s absence was due to a “covid result.”

“Denzel Washington, one of our greatest actors in American history. Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Tony Awards, wide acclaim and admiration from audiences and peers around the world,” Biden said.

Biden also praised Megan Rapinoe, a member of the U.S. women’s national soccer team since 2006 who has won one Olympic gold medal and two World Cup championships. She is also captain of OL Reign, a Seattle-based pro team in the National Women’s Soccer League, and became the first soccer player to be granted the award.

In addition to her success on the soccer field, Rapinoe has played a prominent roles in pushing for equal pay for the women’s national team and has spoken out on social justice and LGBTQ issues.

“Megan is a champion for the essential American truth that everyone — everyone — is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect,” Biden said.

During his four years in office, President Donald Trump honored 24 people, a list populated by practitioners of his favorite sport, golf — Tiger Woods, Gary Player and Annika Sorenstam — and some of his fiercest political allies, such as radio host Rush Limbaugh and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

Biden himself was a recipient of the award, as President Barack Obama surprised him with a medal in the final days of their administration. It was one of Biden’s best days as vice president, he has recalled fondly, when Obama referred to his eight-year partner as “the best vice president America’s ever had” and a “lion of American history.”

From foster-care challenges to gun violence, the recipients have witnessed up close some of the darkest elements of the American experience but have triumphed over that darkness, Biden said. Giffords, for example, co-founded a nonprofit focused on preventing gun violence after she was shot and gravely wounded at a constituent event in Tucson in January 2011. She is married to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a former astronaut, who is up for reelection this year.

Biden also used the occasion to showcase his embrace of bipartisanship and to nod to a Senate where he served for decades. “One of the most decent, stand-up, genuine guys I’ve ever served with — and I serve with a lot of senators — is this guy,” Biden said, referring to Simpson.

“He’s a great hugger,” Simpson deadpanned to the room as Biden placed the award around his neck. The two then hugged.

Biden also served in the Senate with McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee and decorated Vietnam War veteran who died in 2018 of brain cancer. McCain’s widow, Cindy, endorsed Biden in 2020 as the Democrat reversed the party’s fortunes in Arizona, winning the state. Cindy McCain is now the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Agencies for Food and Agriculture.

Biden grew most emotional when talking about McCain, his longtime friend. They shared much, Biden recounted, but there were two topics they did not discuss: McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, and Biden’s loss of his wife and daughter.

“They were significantly different,” Biden said. “But somehow we seem to sort of understand one another.”

He recalled trips they took and political battles they waged.

“I admit to my Democratic friends, I’m the guy that encouraged John to go home and run for office for real,” he said. “Because I knew what incredible courage, intellect and conscience he had. We used to argue like hell on the Senate floor, but then we go down to have lunch together afterwards.”

Cindy McCain, in an interview Thursday with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, said the honor is particularly meaningful given that her late husband was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for 5½ years.

“The fact that it’s the Presidential Medal of Freedom means more to us, I think, than most people,” McCain said. “John was denied his freedom for so long.”

The honorees also included Khizr Khan, a Gold Star father who has been an advocate for the rule of law and religious freedom while serving on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom; and Gen. Wilma Vaught, one of the most decorated women in the history of the U.S. military. Khan spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.

Biden honored Fred Gray, one of the first Black members of the Alabama legislature since Reconstruction and an attorney who represented civil rights activists such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. Other medal recipients include Raúl Yzaguirre, a civil rights advocate who served as chief executive and president of National Council of La Raza for 30 years, and Diane Nash, a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Biden praised Gray’s contribution to helping dismantle unjust laws. “Fred’s legal brilliance of strategy desegregated schools and secured the right to vote,” the president said.

Other recipients included Juliet García, the former president of the University of Texas at Brownsville and the first Mexican American woman to serve as a college president; Father Alexander Karloutsos, the former vicar general of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; and Sandra Lindsay, a New York critical-care nurse who served on the front lines of the pandemic response.

“And I have written, way back, a number of law review articles about the Ninth Amendment and the — and the 14th Amendment and why that privacy is considered as part of a constitutional guarantee. And the — they’ve just wiped it all out.”

— President Biden, remarks in Madrid, June 30

The president has been a fierce critic of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court’s decision that overturned a right to abortion established by the court in Roe v. Wade nearly a half-century ago. During a recent news conference, he said that he had written “a number of law review articles” and that two amendments to the U.S. Constitution had established a right to privacy that was crucial to the reasoning in the Roe opinion.

As we have documented before, the president has a tendency to sometimes embellish the factual record about his past. Earlier this year, he said he was arrested during civil rights protests when there was no evidence that ever happened. He also has claimed he was arrested for trying to see Nelson Mandela, but that was false.

These remarks about law review articles from the past caught our attention. Biden’s first campaign for the presidency, in 1988, collapsed after reporters discovered that Biden had flunked a class in law school for submitting a paper that borrowed heavily from another law review article without proper citation — and then made false or exaggerated claims about his law school record during a discussion months earlier with voters in New Hampshire.

So did Biden write such law review articles?

HeinOnline, an online platform of research articles, shows 19 law review citations that list Biden as an author or co-author. (The full list also includes six articles in Foreign Affairs magazine and other nonlegal publications.) But these articles concern issues such a violence against women, war powers, federal drug policy, world trade and foreign policy — issues that were central to Biden’s long career in the Senate. None of these law review articles concerned the right to privacy.

When we asked the White House for evidence of his statement, we received a long list of citations to comments Biden made about the right to privacy, often when he presided over Supreme Court nominations as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. For instance, one citation noted that Biden got Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., during his confirmation hearings, to agree that there was a right of privacy to be found in the 14th Amendment, and one that “extends to women.”

While these remarks certainly demonstrate Biden’s long-standing interest in the legal debate over these amendments, they cannot be called law review articles.

The White House also provided an opinion piece that appeared under Biden’s name in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1991, headlined, “Yes, the Constitution implies rights that aren’t spelled out.”

This is more on point. The op-ed focuses on the Ninth Amendment, which simply states: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This amendment was an effort by James Madison to deal with concerns that, by listing certain rights, the Bill of Rights would prevent Americans from receiving any rights that had not be spelled out. Biden said in the op-ed that the amendment meant that “we assume that our personal lives are free from government intervention, absent specific constitutional authority for that action.”

But some years after that op-ed was published, the court, in a 1997 ruling, said that these additional rights need to be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.”

In his majority opinion in Dodd, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. used that standard to argue that “the inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

Alito’s recounting of history is not universally accepted. “When the United States was founded and for many subsequent decades, Americans relied on the English common law,” reads an amicus brief filed in Dobbs by the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. “The common law did not regulate abortion in early pregnancy. Indeed, the common law did not even recognize abortion as occurring at that stage. That is because the common law did not legally acknowledge a fetus as existing separately from a pregnant woman until the woman felt fetal movement, called ‘quickening,’ which could occur as late as the 25th week of pregnancy.”

In any case, an opinion piece is not the same thing as a law review article, which tends to be longer and deeper in the legal weeds than a typical op-ed.

Biden can fairly claim to have written an op-ed for a newspaper about the Ninth Amendment and the right to privacy that he believes is part of it. He can also claim to have engaged in long discussions with justices now on the court about the rights embodied in the Ninth and 14th amendments. He certainly has a deep understanding of these issues from his long service on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But the president stated he had written “a number of law review articles” about these amendments. That’s gilding the lily — and a president must remain accurate about his achievements. He earns Two Pinocchios.

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When the dust settled on Jan. 6, 2021, we were unable to agree on whether Donald Trump had incited the insurrection. But at least one conclusion crossed partisan lines: This had been a very bad and violent thing.

Apparently, we can’t even agree upon that anymore. The passage of time has prompted many Republicans to develop an increasingly fantastical view of what transpired that day.

A new Monmouth University poll carries some stark lessons for the work that lies ahead for the House Jan. 6 committee, to the extent that the panel seeks to convince conservative Americans that Trump committed a crime that day. That’s because they increasingly don’t even believe what happened that day — and what they formerly accepted as reality — actually happened.

The poll shows significant reductions in the percentages of Republicans who characterize Jan. 6 not just as an “insurrection” but also a “riot.” And it’s not the first to point in that direction.

In addition, the poll shows more Republicans regard Jan. 6 as a “legitimate protest” than a “riot.”

The poll asked people in June 2021 and June 2022 whether each of those labels were appropriate descriptors for what transpired on Jan. 6, 2021. And the GOP shifts are pretty uniform:

While 33 percent of Republicans said in June 2021 that Jan. 6 was an insurrection, that number is now just 13 percent.While 62 percent of Republicans called it a “riot” back then, that’s down to 45 percent.While 47 percent said it was a “legitimate protest,” that’s now up to 61 percent.

So whereas more Republicans once said it was a “riot” than a “legitimate protest,” by a 15-point margin, that has been flipped, with Republicans favoring the “legitimate protest” label by 16 points. A majority of Republicans no longer even regard Jan. 6 as a “riot.”

And that’s to say nothing of the fact that, yes, it was an insurrection. But at least in that case, the doubters might not truly understand what that word means or might have been fed dubious and incorrect definitions by their favorite cable-news hosts and pundits. (By contrast, people know what a riot is.)

Indeed, what’s particularly striking about these numbers is that this isn’t comparing GOP views of Jan. 6 to the immediate aftermath; it’s comparing them to views in June 2021. By that point, the insurrection-doubter movement and its cohorts had already picked up steam. Yet one-third of Republicans still saw it as an insurrection, and 6 in 10 saw it as a riot. The intervening months have apparently persuaded many to join the doubter movement.

Other polling suggests this has indeed been a slow burn.

The CBS News/YouGov poll is the other big one to repeatedly ask such questions — both immediately after Jan. 6, 2021, and again in December. While 32 percent of Republicans in January 2021 said it was an insurrection, that dropped to 21 percent by December. Belief that it was an attempt to overthrow the government dropped from 27 percent to 18 percent.

But by far, the biggest shift came on an interesting — and telling — question. While in January 2021, 56 percent of Republicans understood Jan. 6 as an attempt “to overturn the election and keep Donald Trump in power,” that number dropped to just 33 percent by December. That’s a remarkable number of people who accepted a pretty vanilla statement about reality and then, nearly a year later, abandoned it.

Was any evidence presented in the intervening months that the insurrectionists weren’t, in fact, trying to overturn the election for Trump? Of course not. Claims about provocateurs had routinely fallen apart, even by that point. But lots and lots of people still talked themselves out of the idea that the express purpose of the Jan. 6 events was actually the purpose. Other terms could be viewed as more subjective, but this one is pretty black and white.

And perhaps better than anything, that shows what’s at work here.

The congressional architects of the new gun violence law signed by President Biden last month focused their efforts at stopping one particular type of perpetrator: the kind of young, angry and isolated men who harbor violent fantasies and exhibit worrisome behavior before purchasing weapons and tragically acting on their impulses in places such as supermarkets in Buffalo and Boulder, Colo., high schools in Santa Fe, Tex., and Parkland, Fla., or elementary schools in Newtown, Conn., and Uvalde, Tex.

Or now a community parade in Highland Park, Ill.

The arrest of 21-year-old Robert E. Crimo III in the deaths of seven Fourth of July paradegoers just nine days after Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act has refocused attention on the all-too-predictable circumstances behind many U.S. mass shootings — and also provided a tragic new lens through which to judge whether the new law will, in fact, be effective.

Crimo’s background — as a reputed loner who made threats of violence and collected weapons, resulting in encounters with law enforcement — appears to be exactly what lawmakers were targeting in the new law.

“The mental health challenges of young, disaffected and alienated boys is a profile that’s all too familiar,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), co-author of the new law, said in a June 8 speech two weeks after an 18-year-old killed 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde. “In terms of their alienation and their developing mental illness and their willingness to not only take their own life, but other people’s lives, unfortunately, it paints an eerily similar picture.”

But the facts thus far known about Crimo’s background, his interactions with law enforcement and his weapons purchases illustrate that the new law — which was a bipartisan compromise measure that did not include more restrictive measures sought by Biden and many Democrats such as an assault weapons ban or higher minimum age for rifle purchases — will probably prove to be far short of a panacea.

Furthermore, the Highland Park case illustrates how the bill’s effectiveness will depend on the decisions of legislators and law enforcement officials at the state and local levels, meaning the nation could continue to see a patchwork approach to combating mass shootings for decades to come.

No aspect of the Highland Park shooting better illustrates that reality than Crimo’s ability to receive a state firearm license and purchase multiple weapons less than a year after police were made aware of violent threats he had allegedly made, prompting officers to seize knives from his home and report him to state authorities as a “clear and present danger.”

“The details are still coming to light,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, a group that advocates for tougher gun restrictions. “But I think it’s fair to say that if the police come to your house and confiscate a knife collection after you’ve threatened to kill everyone, you should not be able to legally purchase firearms months later.”

Illinois has had a red-flag law on the books since 2019, allowing family members or law enforcement to petition a judge for a firearms restraining order to keep weapons away from individuals judged to represent a threat to themselves or others. But it also has a rigorous licensing law, requiring all gun owners to secure a firearm owner identification card, or FOID, from the Illinois State Police before purchasing a weapon.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act includes $750 million in new federal funding that states can use to implement red-flag laws, but it is silent on licensing regimes such as the one in Illinois. In any case, neither law prevented Crimo from purchasing weapons on four occasions from June 2020 through September 2021 — well after Highland Park police had filed the report in September 2019 flagging him as a potential threat.

That’s because the report itself was not enough to disqualify Crimo as a potential gun owner, the Illinois State Police said in a statement Wednesday. State investigators determined that the circumstances of his 2019 encounter with police — in which he denied making threats of violence and said he had no intentions of harming himself or others — did not reach the evidentiary threshold for him to be deemed a clear and present danger.

So when Crimo sought a FOID just three months later with his father’s sponsorship, the state police said in the statement that “there was no new information to establish a clear and present danger, no arrests, no prohibiting criminal records, no mental health prohibiters, no orders of protection, no other disqualifying prohibiters and no Firearms Restraining Order” that would justify rejecting his application.

“The available evidence would have been insufficient for law enforcement to seek a Firearms Restraining Order from a court,” the agency added — claiming that the September 2019 encounter alone could not have triggered the state’s red-flag law.

The Illinois State Police’s word on what was and wasn’t possible in Crimo’s case is not definitive, however, and advocates for tighter gun restrictions point out that Illinois has made scant use of its red-flag law since it was implemented three years ago.

Speak for Safety Illinois, a group that promotes use of the law, said 53 firearm restraining orders were sought in 2019 and 2020, of which only 22 were ultimately granted. By contrast, judges in Florida have granted roughly 9,000 orders since that state’s red-flag law went into effect in 2018.

That is where advocates say the new federal law could make a difference, by giving states that have already enacted red-flag laws more resources to ensure police, judges and the public know what options they have to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.

“It’s a tool, and it has to be taken out of the toolbox — and when it’s not, tragedy ensues,” Watts said. “It is one thing to agree that red-flag laws work. It is another thing to actually use them. And when we look at what happened in Illinois, it is fair to say that red-flag laws [are] underutilized. … For them to work, people have to know what they are, that they are available and then how to use them.”

That educational effort could also help prompt members of the public to report more threats and troubling incidents to police, which could result in more red-flag filings and more robust cases for judges to review — a point law enforcement officials emphasized this week after the Highland Park tragedy. “Law enforcement is going to do everything they possibly can to ensure the community is kept safe, but if we don’t know about it, it’s hard for us to investigate,” Deputy Chief Christopher Covelli of the Lake County, Ill., sheriff’s office said at a news conference Wednesday.

But beyond red-flag laws, other provisions of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act could prevent another would-be shooter with a profile resembling Crimo’s from committing a future horrific act. Those effects, however, are for the most part speculative, given the known circumstances of the Highland Park case and the lack of detailed information about what treatments and interventions the alleged gunman may have had.

The broadest of those provisions, and the element with the most federal funding associated with it, deals with mental health. The bill provides for the establishment of a national network of community behavioral health clinics and puts $1 billion in grant funds toward the expansion of school-based mental health programs, plus another roughly $1 billion in funding for mental health and suicide prevention programs aimed at youth.

Cornyn was among the senators who argued last month that the mental health funding was the key element in stopping someone like 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who killed 19 students and two teachers on May 24 in Uvalde. A Cornyn spokesman declined to comment this week on the new law’s potential to have prevented Monday’s shooting.

“Our goal with this legislation is to try to help people in crisis get treatment before they reach a point like Salvador Ramos,” Cornyn said last month. “I want to be clear, not everybody who’s suffering a mental health crisis is a threat to themselves and others. As a matter of fact, the opposite is true — many people suffer in silence with their parents, their families, their siblings trying to help them to no avail, but there is a small subset of people like [Ramos] who are a danger to themselves and others if they don’t get the kind of help they need.”

The other element of the bill that could have come into play with Crimo was a new enhanced background check for gun buyers under 21, which gives the federal background check system up to 10 days to determine if those young buyers have a disqualifying incident in juvenile criminal justice or mental health records. That would involve contacting the state agency that maintains those records as well as the local police department where the prospective gun buyer resides.

Even if there are no disqualifying juvenile records — and Illinois State Police statements suggest Crimo had none, citing only an underage tobacco offense — the new law’s supporters have argued that the involvement of local police could well be enough to intervene in a potential violent incident. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), in an interview conducted before the Highland Park shooting, said he was confident the provision would have stopped Ramos even though authorities have not released any information to suggest he had a disqualifying juvenile record.

“No doubt this kid had been involved with the local police department,” he said. A call to the Uvalde cops, he added, “would have been an opportunity for the police department to say: ‘Oh, there’s this kid who we know on his 18th birthday went to buy two assault weapons. Maybe we need to go to his house and check in on him.’ You cannot say for certain, but I think there’s a chance that had our under-21 provision been in effect before Uvalde, it could have stopped that shooting.”

The Highland Park tragedy has made one thing clear, however: The push for further federal gun restrictions is not over. Among those raising a need for new measures this week is Eric Rinehart, the Lake County state’s attorney who called on Wednesday for more awareness and better implementation of his state’s red-flag law — but also made clear that tougher federal gun restrictions would have made an even more clear-cut difference.

“The state of Illinois and the United States should ban these types of assault weapons,” he said, referring to the Smith & Wesson M&P 15 rifle that Crimo allegedly used in his attack Monday — a model that is part of the AR-15 family of semiautomatic rifles frequently used by mass shooters. “We had [a national] ban from 1994 to 2004 with bipartisan support. … My position as a public safety professional, as one of the many individuals responsible for the safety of the people in Lake County, is we should have a statewide and national ban on assault weapons.”

That, however, is not on the agenda for this Congress — or likely for many congresses to come. Republicans who supported the new federal law made clear that they did not see it as a first step toward any further gun restrictions. In fact, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and others have said they view the bill as the final word on the problem of mass shootings.

“The problem is mental health and these young men who seem to be inspired to commit these atrocities,” McConnell said at a Tuesday event in Paducah, Ky. “So I think the bill that we passed targeted the problem. We did open up juvenile records to background checks, and hopefully that will help us do a better job of identifying people who have these mental problems before they carry out these awful atrocities.”

But Watts said the fight will go on — if not on Capitol Hill, then in statehouses and city halls across the country. “We knew that this legislation was a first step on a longer path,” she said. “Our goal was to break the logjam in Congress that had prevented any gun safety legislation from passing for over 25 years. … That was a watershed moment in American politics, but more needs to be done.”

Secret Service Director James Murray is stepping down from his post as head of the storied protective service, according to a statement issued by the agency Thursday, a departure that comes at a time when the agency has been in the spotlight and the subject of dramatic congressional testimony.

Murray, who has held the job since 2019, has been looking to retire “for some time” and plans to work in the private sector, according to a senior Department of Homeland Security official with knowledge of his decision.

Murray has accepted a top security job with the California-based social media company Snapchat, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal details. Murray, a 27-year veteran of the Secret Service, filled various top roles at the agency before becoming director in May 2019. His last day will be July 30, according to the statement.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that under Murray’s leadership the Secret Service has “reinforced its stature as the preeminent protective agency in the world and has increased in sophistication and scope its investigative capabilities.”

A statement from the Secret Service said Murray “helped the agency navigate the unique challenges presented by the historic COVID-19 pandemic” while continuing to perform “its integrated mission of providing protection to senior elected leaders and investigating crimes targeting our financial infrastructure.”

Still, the agency, best known for protecting current and former presidents and their families, has endured multiple controversies over the past decade, including a prostitution scandal, White House security missteps during the Obama administration and allegations of politicization under President Donald Trump.

Two Secret Service employees in South Korea for President Biden’s trip to Asia in May were involved in conduct that ended in a confrontation with South Korean citizens. The incident occurred while the agents were off duty, but they returned to the United States and were placed on administrative leave.

That episode occurred a month after agency leaders acknowledged that four Secret Service employees — including an agent assigned to protect first lady Jill Biden — had allegedly been hoodwinked by two men impersonating federal agents, who plied them with gifts.

In recent weeks, its agents have become central characters in the House committee investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, with sometimes explosive testimony bringing unwanted attention to the agency.

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified under oath last month that she was told that Trump lashed out at his protective detail on Jan. 6, when agents would not take him to join his supporters in marching toward the Capitol, at one point lunging for the steering wheel of the presidential vehicle.

Officials have said anonymously that the Secret Service agents take issue with some of the details of Hutchinson’s account — and have said they are prepared to do so in sworn testimony — although they do not dispute the notion that Trump was angry and wanted to be taken to the Capitol.

Hutchinson also testified that Trump had complained that the Secret Service’s screening for weapons was preventing armed supporters from entering his “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse.

The Secret Service has also been part of the focus on Vice President Mike Pence, who refused requests from his detail to get into an armored car during the Jan. 6 assault. According to testimony, he was concerned that his protectors would take him away from the Capitol and prevent him from overseeing the final count of electoral college votes.

White House officials on Thursday said that there was no connection between the congressional hearings and Murray’s departure. “This has been in talks for several months — for his retirement, I believe, since April,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “So, before the January 6th hearing.”

Jean-Pierre declined to discuss a potential replacement for Murray, but when asked if Biden would name the first Black director of the service, she noted the president’s commitment to diversity.

“I’m not going to get ahead of the process, but as you know this is a president that prides himself on making sure that we have equity, that we have inclusion,” she said. “You see that up and down his administration. He wants to make sure that we have an administration that looks like America.”

Congressional Democrats and Republicans on Thursday seethed over new reports that the IRS may have targeted President Donald Trump’s political enemies with audits, issuing shared calls — backed by the tax agency itself — for a full federal probe into the matter.

The demands arrived in response to reports that the IRS initiated detailed reviews into the tax records of James B. Comey, the former FBI director, and Andrew McCabe, a deputy who later took over the agency. Trump repeatedly trained his public ire on the two men, leading Comey to raise the possibility this week that the newly revealed audits amounted to political payback. The former president, however, has said he had no knowledge of the IRS’s work.

With Comey and McCabe, the suspicions of interference ran high because of their past work to investigate Trump in connection with his 2016 campaign, including his efforts to obstruct the federal probe. Normally, the tax audits to which the two men were later subject are rare and random. But the fact that they both experienced them within the space of a few years perplexed a wide array of IRS officials, former agency aides and congressional lawmakers who said the situation warranted further review.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top lawmaker on the Senate Finance Committee, requested a “thorough investigation” and pledged that his panel would explore the matter. Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), the leader of the tax-focused House Ways and Means Committee, expressed fear that the situation “reeks of political targeting.” And Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), the leading GOP lawmaker on the panel, said he would support “investigating all allegations of political targeting.”

An investigation into the matter would be carried out by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, or TIGTA, which typically opens probes at lawmakers’ request. A senior government official familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss it, said Charles Rettig — the head of the IRS under Trump, who stayed in his position at President Biden’s request — had referred the issue to the watchdog for review. A spokesman for TIGTA declined to comment.

In a statement, IRS spokeswoman Jodie Reynolds maintained Rettig personally “is not involved in individual audits or taxpayer cases,” which instead are handled by “career civil servants.”

“As IRS commissioner, he has never been in contact with the White House — in either administration — on IRS enforcement or individual taxpayer matters,” Reynolds said. “He has been committed to running the IRS in an impartial, unbiased manner from top to bottom.”

The swift reactions and sharp condemnations reflected the seriousness of the controversy and the legacy of distrust that surrounds the IRS in Washington. It immediately raised the specter of the disgraced Nixon administration, which leveraged the agency — and its vast powers to scrutinize Americans’ finances — as a political weapon.

Trump, however, stressed in a statement: “I have no knowledge of this.” Instead, he highlighted an earlier report from a Justice Department inspector general that had criticized Comey and McCabe, adding: “[T]ell us what you think after you read it.”

For years, Trump has repeatedly and publicly attacked Comey and McCabe, calling for them to be charged with crimes and accusing them of pursuing a politically motivated witch hunt against him. While both men were investigated, and at times criticized for their conduct, neither was charged with any crime.

“I don’t know whether anything improper happened, but after learning how unusual this audit was and how badly Trump wanted to hurt me during that time, it made sense to try to figure it out,” Comey said in a statement. “Maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe somebody misused the I.R.S. to get at a political enemy. Given the role Trump wants to continue to play in our country, we should know the answer to that question.”

A lawyer for McCabe confirmed that he, too, was audited.

The New York Times, which first reported the audits, said Comey’s audit began in 2019 and focused on his 2017 tax return, the year he signed a seven-figure book deal. McCabe’s audit began in 2021, months into the Biden administration, and focused on his tax return for 2019.

The initiative under which they were audited — now known as the National Research Program — was designed as a teeth-pulling process to help the IRS determine which taxpayers are most likely not to pay all the taxes they owe. In past years, roughly 15,000 taxpayers were randomly audited annually, though budget cuts have lowered the number recently. The unit is staffed by modelers, statisticians and research analysts.

“This is either the most brazen of crimes involving manipulation of audit processes or a complete statistical fluke,” said Joseph Rillotta, a former counsel to the IRS commissioner now in private practice as a white-collar tax attorney.

As a rule, taxpayers with employers — those who file W-2 forms — tend to evade taxes less frequently than self-employed people, whose compliance rate can fall below 50 percent. So the IRS program can tend to oversample self-employed workers, a category into which Comey and McCabe may have fallen when they left the government after Trump fired them, according to one senior IRS official who like others in this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the agency’s process.

Other senior IRS officials said the tax agency leaped into action immediately after learning about the audits of Comey and McCabe. The aides said the IRS sought to ensure the inspector general took action to investigate. IRS leaders also moved to insulate Rettig and the broader workforce from any perception of political bias.

In a culture designed to avoid political interference, these officials said they could not imagine how a president could interfere and target enemies for an audit. But they also acknowledged that the possibility existed, given the unique circumstances.

“The IRS culture is so much a by-the-book culture,” one official said. “Yet the likelihood of both of these men being audited is not impossible. Nobody has any idea what to think. Nobody believes the IRS targeted these people, and at the same time no one believes they didn’t because when you have two people like this, it’s kind of odd.”

Regardless, Mark Everson, who served as IRS commissioner during President George W. Bush’s administration, said someone at the agency should have blocked a random audit of Comey if the program selected him — precisely because of his political status.

“Somebody should have exercised more judgment before proceeding with the Comey audit,” Everson said. “I would have hoped that would be the case. Even if randomly selected, I think a supervisor should have said, ‘We can just knock this one out.’ ”

For congressional Democrats and Republicans, meanwhile, the allegations served as stark reminders of the tax agency’s troubled past. In the wake of the Nixon scandal, the IRS prided itself on systems designed to keep politics or personal motivations out of the agency’s tax review process.

The agency has only two political appointees: the commissioner and the general counsel. The rest of its staff is composed of career employees. But political controversies still have dogged its work, including an incident more than a decade ago that left Republicans seething over audits targeted at conservative nonprofit groups, including those associated with the tea party.

The trouble loomed large over then-President Barack Obama and helped bring about a generation of steep budget cuts at the IRS, depleting its staff and its ability to carry out audits that target tax cheats. Rettig himself has estimated the tax gap — the discrepancy between taxes owed and how much the agency collects — at roughly $1 trillion annually. Democrats’ attempts later to bolster IRS enforcement similarly met steep Republican resistance, with some expressing renewed fears that it would pry improperly into Americans’ lives.

On Thursday, the fresh allegations of mismanagement left some in Congress to direct their criticism at Rettig, calling for his ouster before his term expires at the end of the year. Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.), a top member of the House Ways and Means Committee, described the commissioner’s leadership as “one catastrophe after another.”

“Charles Rettig has wrecked public trust in the IRS, and I reiterate my calls for President Biden to fire Mr. Rettig immediately,” Pascrell said. “If Mr. Rettig cared at all about this agency, he would hand in his resignation today.”

Jeff Stein and Jacob Bogage contributed to this report.

The resignation of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is testament to the power of elected politicians to hold their leaders accountable. It is a lesson that has been lost on Republican Party officials as they have weighed repeatedly how to deal with former president Donald Trump.

Johnson’s resignation Thursday came after a collapse in support among members of his government and Conservative Party backbenchers. Nothing like that has happened to Trump, not during his first impeachment, nor his second impeachment, not even after the role he played in the attack on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. In each case, all but a handful of Republican elected officials rallied behind Trump — and still do.

Johnson’s resignation came after a lengthy period of decline in his standing. He has been on the defensive for months over one scandal after another. He tried to talk his way out of his troubles and for a time succeeded. He was defiant in the face of the evidence, then offered apologies when he could not evade the truth.

The crumbling of support this week began when two prominent cabinet members, Rishi Sunak, the government’s treasury minister, and Sajid Javid, the health secretary, announced their resignations. By the time Johnson resigned, more than 50 ministers and junior ministers had announced their resignations from their government positions.

On the day before Johnson announced his resignation as leader of his party (he said he would remain as prime minister until a new party leader is chosen), the public chorus of calls for him to step down continued to grow louder. Adding to those public voices, members of his cabinet — even some seeming loyalists — met him at Number 10 Downing Street to privately tell him his time was up.

Those warnings were reminiscent of what happened to President Richard M. Nixon in August 1974, when senior Republicans from Congress, led by Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, went to the White House and told Nixon that his support in the Senate had collapsed, a sign that he would likely have been convicted in an impeachment trial. Rather than going down in history as the first president to be impeached and convicted, Nixon chose the less unsavory course and resigned the office.

Trump has never experienced what Johnson has just gone through. At no time have Republican leaders — senators, House members, governors, national or state party officials — collectively tried to confront him. After Jan. 6, 2021, there was talk among Trump’s Cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment and declaring him unfit for the office, but it came to nothing. Lawmakers condemned him for the attack on the Capitol and then over time began to compliantly fall back in line.

Johnson was elected as the Tory leader in 2019 after the resignation of former prime minister Theresa May in part because he was seen by others in the party as someone with the appeal to win a general election, and someone who could hold together a party divided over resolving the 2016 national referendum to leave the European Union, the Brexit decision. In a general election late that year, he proved them right, delivering an 80-seat parliamentary majority against a weakened Labour Party with a compromised leader.

Recently, however, the party’s fortunes were beginning to flag and Johnson was becoming a political liability. Conservatives did just enough in local elections in May to sustain him in power, suffering losses but not as big as some feared. Late last month, Conservatives lost two special elections. Earlier in the month, he survived a no-confidence vote within his own party, but even then, the prospects of the Tories winning a general election began to dim.

Johnson seemed to have an unlimited number of political lives, but his fellow Conservatives found defending him too difficult. With the latest scandal, the revelation that he had been warned about the sexual misconduct of Chris Pincher, a Tory politician appointed as chief deputy whip, did nothing about it and claimed that he had not been warned, the stench of his leadership became too much.

Republicans have not reached that point with Trump. They have weighed the consequences of challenging someone who remains the dominant force in their party and decided either to vigorously defend him or simply to remain silent. They say they are on the cusp of taking back the majority in the House and possibly the Senate. They are willing to ride it out against the evidence that has piled up during the hearings by the House select committee investigation the Jan. 6 attack.

There are similarities in the characters of Johnson and Trump, which may be why they were instinctively drawn to one another. Even as Johnson was maneuvering against May, Trump was praising him and hectoring her, including one celebrated interview in which he criticized May and spoke highly of Johnson as he was arriving for a visit to the United Kingdom with May as his host.

Neither Johnson nor Trump truly took seriously the responsibilities of their office. Both preferred bluster to serious study. They are showmen not statesmen, given to rhetorical excess and flashy displays, reveling in the roar of the crowd. Both have a propensity to spread false claims, even when it’s obvious.

Johnson may have been willing to offer apologies when caught and cornered, but that was more an instinct for survival rather than sincerity. His resignation speech was anything but contrite. Trump seems even more incapable of acknowledging mistakes.

But it is the differences in the political systems of the two countries that help to explain why what happened to Johnson this week has never happened to Trump.

Britain’s elected officials have much more power to determine who leads their parties and therefore who will become prime minister through a general election. The successor to Johnson ultimately will be determined by a vote of the full Conservative Party membership, the rank-and-file loyalists throughout the United Kingdom. But to get to the final vote, those seeking to lead the party must first survive votes among the parliamentary membership, who winnow the field to the final two candidates.

Trump has never been beholden to the elected officials of the Republican Party, most of whom initially opposed his candidacy for president. Beyond their ability to endorse someone, they have no significant role in selecting the party’s presidential nominee. Trump hijacked the GOP on his way to becoming the 2016 nominee, bent it in his direction and defied the party establishment to challenge him. He continues to do so.

No one expects Republicans who hold office to turn on Trump at this point. They have too much invested in avoiding an internal war with Trump’s most loyal supporters ahead of the 2022 election, where the odds are in their favor. How well Trump-endorsed candidates do in November could change the calculus of some GOP leaders as they look to 2024 and the question of who should be the party’s presidential nominee.

Still, the role that elected officials played in forcing Johnson to give up his post is a reminder of the degree to which Republican leaders in this country — elected lawmakers, former White House officials and members of the Trump Cabinet — have chosen a different path.

It’s true that political calculations entered significantly into what happened in Britain this week and political calculations will affect how Republicans respond to Trump in the future. But when confronted with what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, only a few Republicans stood up, spoke out loudly and sustained that criticism, whatever the political consequences.

The resignation of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is testament to the power of elected politicians to hold their leaders accountable. It is a lesson that has been lost on Republican Party officials as they have weighed repeatedly how to deal with former president Donald Trump.

Johnson’s resignation Thursday came after a collapse in support among members of his government and Conservative Party backbenchers. Nothing like that has happened to Trump, not during his first impeachment, nor his second impeachment, not even after the role he played in the attack on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. In each case, all but a handful of Republican elected officials rallied behind Trump — and still do.

Johnson’s resignation came after a lengthy period of decline in his standing. He has been on the defensive for months over one scandal after another. He tried to talk his way out of his troubles and for a time succeeded. He was defiant in the face of the evidence, then offered apologies when he could not evade the truth.

The crumbling of support this week began when two prominent cabinet members, Rishi Sunak, the government’s treasury minister, and Sajid Javid, the health secretary, announced their resignations. By the time Johnson resigned, more than 50 ministers and junior ministers had announced their resignations from their government positions.

On the day before Johnson announced his resignation as leader of his party (he said he would remain as prime minister until a new party leader is chosen), the public chorus of calls for him to step down continued to grow louder. Adding to those public voices, members of his cabinet — even some seeming loyalists — met him at Number 10 Downing Street to privately tell him his time was up.

Those warnings were reminiscent of what happened to President Richard M. Nixon in August 1974, when senior Republicans from Congress, led by Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, went to the White House and told Nixon that his support in the Senate had collapsed, a sign that he would likely have been convicted in an impeachment trial. Rather than going down in history as the first president to be impeached and convicted, Nixon chose the less unsavory course and resigned the office.

Trump has never experienced what Johnson has just gone through. At no time have Republican leaders — senators, House members, governors, national or state party officials — collectively tried to confront him. After Jan. 6, 2021, there was talk among Trump’s Cabinet about invoking the 25th Amendment and declaring him unfit for the office, but it came to nothing. Lawmakers condemned him for the attack on the Capitol and then over time began to compliantly fall back in line.

Johnson was elected as the Tory leader in 2019 after the resignation of former prime minister Theresa May in part because he was seen by others in the party as someone with the appeal to win a general election, and someone who could hold together a party divided over resolving the 2016 national referendum to leave the European Union, the Brexit decision. In a general election late that year, he proved them right, delivering an 80-seat parliamentary majority against a weakened Labour Party with a compromised leader.

Recently, however, the party’s fortunes were beginning to flag and Johnson was becoming a political liability. Conservatives did just enough in local elections in May to sustain him in power, suffering losses but not as big as some feared. Late last month, Conservatives lost two special elections. Earlier in the month, he survived a no-confidence vote within his own party, but even then, the prospects of the Tories winning a general election began to dim.

Johnson seemed to have an unlimited number of political lives, but his fellow Conservatives found defending him too difficult. With the latest scandal, the revelation that he had been warned about the sexual misconduct of Chris Pincher, a Tory politician appointed as chief deputy whip, did nothing about it and claimed that he had not been warned, the stench of his leadership became too much.

Republicans have not reached that point with Trump. They have weighed the consequences of challenging someone who remains the dominant force in their party and decided either to vigorously defend him or simply to remain silent. They say they are on the cusp of taking back the majority in the House and possibly the Senate. They are willing to ride it out against the evidence that has piled up during the hearings by the House select committee investigation the Jan. 6 attack.

There are similarities in the characters of Johnson and Trump, which may be why they were instinctively drawn to one another. Even as Johnson was maneuvering against May, Trump was praising him and hectoring her, including one celebrated interview in which he criticized May and spoke highly of Johnson as he was arriving for a visit to the United Kingdom with May as his host.

Neither Johnson nor Trump truly took seriously the responsibilities of their office. Both preferred bluster to serious study. They are showmen not statesmen, given to rhetorical excess and flashy displays, reveling in the roar of the crowd. Both have a propensity to spread false claims, even when it’s obvious.

Johnson may have been willing to offer apologies when caught and cornered, but that was more an instinct for survival rather than sincerity. His resignation speech was anything but contrite. Trump seems even more incapable of acknowledging mistakes.

But it is the differences in the political systems of the two countries that help to explain why what happened to Johnson this week has never happened to Trump.

Britain’s elected officials have much more power to determine who leads their parties and therefore who will become prime minister through a general election. The successor to Johnson ultimately will be determined by a vote of the full Conservative Party membership, the rank-and-file loyalists throughout the United Kingdom. But to get to the final vote, those seeking to lead the party must first survive votes among the parliamentary membership, who winnow the field to the final two candidates.

Trump has never been beholden to the elected officials of the Republican Party, most of whom initially opposed his candidacy for president. Beyond their ability to endorse someone, they have no significant role in selecting the party’s presidential nominee. Trump hijacked the GOP on his way to becoming the 2016 nominee, bent it in his direction and defied the party establishment to challenge him. He continues to do so.

No one expects Republicans who hold office to turn on Trump at this point. They have too much invested in avoiding an internal war with Trump’s most loyal supporters ahead of the 2022 election, where the odds are in their favor. How well Trump-endorsed candidates do in November could change the calculus of some GOP leaders as they look to 2024 and the question of who should be the party’s presidential nominee.

Still, the role that elected officials played in forcing Johnson to give up his post is a reminder of the degree to which Republican leaders in this country — elected lawmakers, former White House officials and members of the Trump Cabinet — have chosen a different path.

It’s true that political calculations entered significantly into what happened in Britain this week and political calculations will affect how Republicans respond to Trump in the future. But when confronted with what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, only a few Republicans stood up, spoke out loudly and sustained that criticism, whatever the political consequences.

One question hovering over President Biden’s Middle East trip next week, especially his Saudi Arabia stop, is how complicit American-made weapons are in the deaths of Yemeni civilians.

During the trip, Biden will discuss the U.N.-mediated truce in Yemen, which White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said “has led to the most peaceful period there since war began seven years ago.”

Yet that long and brutal war has been fueled by the supply of U.S. weapons to the Saudi-led coalition waging it. Reports have documented massive civilian deaths. Last year, the United States vowed to end support of the coalition’s offensive operations, including through arms sales.

But a report by the Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, raises troubling questions about how seriously State Department and Defense Department officials take that pledge.

Starting in 2015, the United States provided military support to the coalition, the report explained, which sought to restore Yemen’s government after an Iran-backed Houthi military offensive overtook Sana’a, the capital.

Through 2021, the Pentagon approved $54.6 billion in military support to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to the report. More than a third ($18.3 billion) was for missiles, including air-launched, ground-launched, and sea-launched varieties. Aircraft, ships, ammunition and weapons, all of which can be used offensively, also were included.

During that period, 23,000 airstrikes killed or injured more than 18,000 civilians, according to U.N. estimates.

Questions about American complicity in those deaths and injuries remain because U.S. officials can’t define the terms of the discussion — or war.

“In February 2021 the President announced his intent to end U.S. support for offensive operations in Yemen,” Jason Bair, GAO’s director of international affairs and trade, said in an email. “While State officials told us that they attempt to distinguish between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ weapons, they have no specific definitions of ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive.’ ”

If the U.S. government can’t tell the difference between offensive and defensive weapons, that’s a fundamental problem generating others issues.

“Without clear definitions of ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ weapons, it can be difficult for the State Department to implement the President’s wishes” to end offensive weapons assistance, Bair added. He noted that “State’s assessment is based on the INTENDED use of the weapons, which may or may not match the actual use. State and DOD lack a comprehensive picture of how U.S. assistance has actually been used in the war in Yemen.”

There’s another problem with terms. Pentagon policy prohibits the “the misuse or unauthorized transfer” of defense goods and services, but those terms are not defined.

“DOD and State officials both said that use that causes civilian harm would not necessarily constitute ‘misuse,’ ” GAO’s report said.

While American officials don’t know how much harm American materials have caused in Yemen, the United Nations found “that U.S.-origin defense articles may have been used in strikes that caused substantial civilian harm in a manner that violated international humanitarian law,” the watchdog reported.

Curiously, U.S. officials haven’t tried to find out what harm their military supplies have caused.

“Despite several reports that airstrikes and other attacks by Saudi Arabia and UAE have caused extensive civilian harm in Yemen,” the report said, “DOD has not reported and State could not provide evidence that it investigated any incidents of potential unauthorized use of equipment transferred to Saudi Arabia or UAE.”

The Pentagon also “has not fully measured the extent to which its advising and training have facilitated civilian harm reduction in Yemen,” GAO found.

That tells Phyllis Bennis, a program director at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, that “the U.S. military has no intention of tracking — let alone trying to seriously diminish — civilian casualties that it causes in the so-called Global War on Terror. It speaks to the legacies of racism, xenophobia and indeed cruelty in these wars.”

Asked to comment on the GAO report, the Pentagon punted to State.

“We have engaged with the Saudi-led Coalition for several years on efforts to reduce the risk of civilian casualties and harm,” State’s public affairs office said by email. “The Saudis have received training from U.S. forces on Law of Armed Conflict, air-to-ground targeting procedures, and best practices for mitigating the risk of civilian casualties. The Saudi government has taken some steps to improve its targeting processes and adopted mechanisms for investigating alleged incidents of civilian casualties, though we recognize there is work to be done. …

“To truly address the issue of civilian casualties in Yemen,” the statement continued, “we must also stop the kinds of violence that have been responsible for the vast majority of civilian casualties in recent years, like shelling, small-arms fire, and land mines. We have unfortunately seen the latter persist even during this current U.N. truce.”

How GAO’s findings affect Biden’s trip and ongoing U.S.-Saudi relations depends to some extent on Congress, according to Akshaya Kumar, director of crisis advocacy for Human Rights Watch.

“Now they have a GAO report that shows the oversight is inadequate and incomplete,” she said. “So, we’re really hoping that Congress then takes up the mantle once again to pressure the administration to rethink its approach.”

While American officials don’t know how much harm American materials have caused in Yemen, the United Nations found “that U.S.-origin defense articles may have been used in strikes that caused substantial civilian harm in a manner that violated international humanitarian law,” GAO reported.

For Human Rights Watch, which has published numerous reports about the tragedy in Yemen, the solution is not complex.

“The U.S. government … should just stop selling all weapons to the kingdom Saudi Arabia, at least until there’s an end to these abusive actions in Yemen,” Kumar said. “Just end all arms sales.”

Vice President Harris will meet Friday with Democratic state legislators from states that are expected to enact or bolster abortion bans in coming months, following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to a senior White House official.

The states — Indiana, Florida, South Dakota, Nebraska and Montana — all have Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures, and many have indicated they will soon act to further restrict access to abortions.

South Dakota and Florida have already passed versions of an abortion ban, but they may convene special sessions to enhance those restrictions. Indiana’s special session on abortion is scheduled to begin July 25.

Since the court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, the administration has asked Harris to take a leadership role in its response. She has hosted meetings with faith leaders, health-care providers, constitutional law and privacy experts, and attorneys general strategizing about how to protect abortion access — and how to prevent the erosion of other rights.

Administration officials see the first female vice president, who is of Black and Asian descent, as a particularly strong messenger on the issue of abortion rights. On Saturday, at the Essence Festival, one of the largest gatherings of Black women in the country, Harris said there is a link between states taking away the right to an abortion and those that are restricting voting rights.

“At least 11 states are doing both at the same time,” Harris said. “No surprise there.”

During Friday’s meeting, according to the official, Harris will encourage the legislators to continue fighting for reproductive rights in their states and convey the White House’s commitment to helping them.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision, the administration has scrambled to show it is doing all in its power to protect access to abortions — and faced wilting criticism from members of the Democratic base concerned the White House is not doing enough.

Biden and Harris have told voters they should express their anger at the polls this November and give Democrats the legislative majorities they need to enshrine abortion access into federal law. But those exhortations ring hollow for some activists who say their votes handed Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2020 and they have been disappointed in the result.

Biden has said his administration would seek to ensure access to medication abortions, which can be prescribed via telehealth visits and induced by pills shipped in the mail, potentially skirting state abortion restrictions. The administration has also sought to find ways to help women cross state lines to obtain an abortion.

Harris had initial reservations about becoming the face of the administration’s response, worried she could be pigeonholed on the issue because of her gender, according to people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose a sensitive dynamic. Ultimately, she decided to take on the issue and is expected to play a prominent role in coming months.

Friday’s meeting, which will take place in the vice president’s ceremonial office, will be live-streamed on the White House’s website.

The attendees include Indiana House Minority Leader Phil GiaQuinta; incoming Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell; South Dakota House Minority Whip Erin Healy; Nebraska state Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks; and Montana state Sen. Diane Sands.