Texas Rep. Al Green escorted out of House chamber after waving sign during Trump’s State of the Union
Published:
Updated:
WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 24: Rep. Al Green (D-TX) holds a sign as he is ejected from the chamber as Trump delivers his State of the Union address during a Joint Session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on February 24, 2026, in Washington, DC. Trump delivered his address days after the Supreme Court struck down the administration's tariff strategy and amid a U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf threatening Iran. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) (Andrew Harnik, 2026 Getty Images)
WASHINGTON D.C. – Texas Representative Al Green was escorted out of the House of Representatives Tuesday evening after waving a sign during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.
Green was holding a sign that said, “Black people aren’t apes,” an apparent reference to a video shared in a social media post by the president featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as apes.
The post was later deleted after backlash from both Republicans and Democrats.
This is the second time Green has been removed from an address that Donald Trump has given. Last year, Green was removed from the House chamber after disrupting President Trump’s address.
The House of Representatives ultimately voted to censure Green after the incident last year.
Texas Representative Is Pressured to Resign Over Messages to Staff Member
J. David Goodman and Edgar Sandoval
Reporting from Houston and San Antonio
Representative Tony Gonzales, a Republican from a Texas border district, faced growing pressure to resign on Monday amid allegations that he had coerced a sexual relationship with a staff member who later killed herself.
Mr. Gonzales sent “sexual texts” to the staff member, Regina Santos-Aviles, and appeared to pressure her into a relationship, according to Bobby Barrera, a lawyer for Ms. Santos-Aviles’s husband. Mr. Barrera said in an interview that he had reviewed the text messages.
In the messages, Mr. Barrera said he saw Ms. Santos-Aviles telling the congressman over text message that she didn’t “think this is appropriate.” And yet despite that, Mr. Gonzales continued to “coerce her to make requests of a sexual nature,” Mr. Barrera said.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Gonzales did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Images and descriptions of text messages between Mr. Gonzales and Ms. Santos-Aviles were published on Monday, including by The San Antonio Express-News, leading several Republican and Democratic members of Congress to call for Mr. Gonzales’s resignation.
“Resign!” wrote Representative Lauren Boebert, a hard-right Republican from Colorado, in a social media post that included images of the text messages.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican on the House Oversight Committee, urged colleagues to condemn Mr. Gonzales for “asking for explicit photos” of a member of his staff.
“As a woman, this is really disgusting to see,” she said. She added, “shame on you,” referring to Mr. Gonzales.
Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, also said Mr. Gonzales should resign immediately instead of “campaigning like nothing happened.”
Mr. Gonzales, who is facing a tough re-election fight in the Republican primary on March 3, has denied engaging in a sexual relationship with Ms. Santos-Aviles. He has said the affair allegations were part of a smear campaign by his top rival in the race, Brandon Herrera, a hard-line conservative, YouTuber and gun rights advocate known as the AK Guy. Mr. Gonzales has accused Mr. Barrera and Ms. Santos-Aviles’s husband of trying to blackmail him.
Ms. Santos-Aviles’s husband, Adrian Aviles, has denied any blackmailing and said in an interview on Monday that Mr. Gonzales “carries no remorse” for his actions. “I don’t think he deserves to be in the seat that he sits,” Mr. Aviles said.
Members of the Texas congressional delegation also began coming out against Mr. Gonzales on Monday, including Brandon Gill and Chip Roy, who is running for Texas attorney general.
“We need conservative warriors in Congress representing the values of Texans,” Mr. Roy said Monday on social media, backing Mr. Gonzales’s opponent.
“America deserves better,” Mr. Gill said. “Tony should drop out of the race.”
Just a few weeks ago, Mr. Gonzales appeared poised to win in a primary rematch against Mr. Herrera, whom he had narrowly defeated in a runoff two years ago. Mr. Gonzales, a relatively moderate Republican, had aligned himself with President Trump on immigration issues and received an endorsement from him, which he has featured prominently in his political ads.
“The conventional wisdom was that he would win,” said Jon Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Mr. Taylor said he was also a resident of Mr. Gonzales’s district, which stretches from San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso and down along the border with Mexico. The race, Mr. Taylor said, has “turned absolutely upside down.”
The text messages have surfaced a broader question of whether a sex scandal can derail a political campaign in 2026, particularly in a Republican primary. The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has been leading in polls in his primary for U.S. Senate despite his wife declaring last year that she was leaving him over an extramarital affair. Mr. Paxton is seeking to unseat Senator John Cornyn.
There were several aspects of Mr. Gonzales’s situation that appeared to set it apart from Mr. Paxton’s indiscretion, Mr. Taylor said.
“Maybe it’s because he’s having an affair with the staffer. Maybe it’s because the staffer committed suicide,” he said. “Maybe some people have figured out that there has to be some sort of red line when it comes to salacious behavior.”
The Republican speaker of the U.S. House, Mike Johnson, said on Monday that while he had endorsed Mr. Gonzales for re-election, the accusations of a sexual affair with a staff member emerged after that endorsement and needed to be investigated. Mr. Johnson did not call for his resignation. He said he had spoken with Mr. Gonzales, who promised to address the issue.
“You have to let the system play out,” Mr. Johnson said. “The allegations are clearly very serious, and Tony Gonzales will address it — I think he will.”
The House passed a measure in 2018 forbidding representatives from having sexual relationships with their staff members. And after extensive discussion, lawmakers in both chambers passed a bill to change how Congress handled sexual harassment complaints, which included speeding up the reporting process for staff members and holding lawmakers liable for harassment or retaliation claims.
Ms. Santos-Aviles worked for several years in Mr. Gonzales’s district office in Uvalde. A staff member who worked alongside Ms. Santos-Aviles said she had told him of the affair she had with “our boss” in 2024.
Shortly after the affair ended in June 2024, Mr. Gonzales stopped visiting the district office, according to the former staff member, who requested anonymity to avoid potential ramifications for family members.
Mr. Aviles suspected something was going in early June 2024, said Mr. Barrera, his lawyer, and began looking through her phone then.
“In reviewing the texts, it became apparent to him that there was some nonprofessional relationship, sexual texts going back and forth,” Mr. Barrera said.
“There is communication where she even questioned, ‘Why did you hire me? Did you only hire me because I’m attractive?’” Mr. Barrera said. “And he responds, ‘Well, of course not.’ And then the very next communications are sexually related.”
In September 2025, Ms. Santos-Aviles sustained burn injuries while alone in the backyard of her home, the police said at the time. It was not clear if her death had a connection to her interactions with Mr. Gonzales. Ms. Santos-Aviles did not immediately die from her injuries and told police officers that she had been upset over her husband’s new romantic relationship, according to police records cited by The San Antonio Express-News.
But Mr. Barrera said her emotional state changed in the aftermath of the interactions with Mr. Gonzales in 2024.
“She was in significant emotional distress,” Mr. Barrera said. “Her entire life was unraveling,” he added.
Annie Karni and Michael Gold contributed reporting from Washington.
J. David Goodman is the Texas bureau chief for The Times, based in Houston.
Edgar Sandoval covers Texas for The Times, with a focus on the Latino community and the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 25, 2026, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Congressman Is Pressed To Resign Over Sending ‘Sexual Texts’ to an Aide.
Epstein Files Are Missing Records About Woman Who Made Claim Against Trump
The vast trove of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein failed to include some key materials related to a woman who made an accusation against President Trump, according to a review by The New York Times.
The materials are F.B.I. memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.
The existence of the memos was revealed in an index listing the investigative materials related to her account, which was publicly released. According to that index, the F.B.I. conducted four interviews in connection with her claims and wrote summaries about each one. But only one of the summaries, which describes her accusations against Mr. Epstein, was released by the Justice Department. The other three are missing.
The public files also do not include the underlying interview notes, which the index also indicates are part of the file. The Justice Department released similar interview notes in connection to F.B.I. interviews with other potential witnesses and victims.
It is unclear why the materials are missing. The Justice Department said in a statement to The Times on Monday that “the only materials that have been withheld were either privileged or duplicates.” In a new statement on Tuesday, the department also noted that documents could have been withheld because of “an ongoing federal investigation.” Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Justice Department said in a new statement that it was reviewing which documents were released in connection to the index. The department said it would publish any documents “found to have been improperly tagged in the review process” that are legally required to be made public.
The woman’s description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump in the 1980s is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the president, that are contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.
When the files were made public late last month, officials described the trove as including all material sent by the public to the F.B.I. “Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement at the time, calling such claims “unfounded and false.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. In a statement on Tuesday, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said Mr. Trump had “been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”
A lawyer who previously represented the woman in a lawsuit against Mr. Epstein’s estate declined to comment.
The missing records deepen questions about how the Justice Department has handled the release of the Epstein files, which was mandated by a law signed by Mr. Trump last year after bipartisan congressional pressure.
Under the law, the Justice Department can redact material that could be used to identify Mr. Epstein’s victims, depicted violence or child sexual abuse, or would hurt a continuing federal investigation. But the law expressly prohibited federal officials from withholding or redacting materials “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity” to public figures.
Some lawmakers and survivors of Mr. Epstein’s abuse have strongly condemned the department for how it handled redactions, noting that details identifying some victims were left exposed and nude photographs of young women were included in the public release, while material related to claims of abuse by other men had been heavily redacted.
The woman who made the accusation about Mr. Trump came forward in July 2019, days after federal investigators arrested Mr. Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, according to records in the public files of tips the F.B.I. received during that period. She claimed that she had been repeatedly assaulted by Mr. Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s, according to a summary of an F.B.I. interview with her on July 24, 2019.
The F.B.I. did three subsequent interviews to assess her account in August and October 2019 and made a summary of each interview, according to the index of records compiled in the case. But the memos describing those three interviews were not publicly released.
The public files do contain a 2025 description of her account, as well as other accusations against prominent men contained in the documents. In that 2025 memo, federal officials wrote that the woman had said that Mr. Epstein introduced her to Mr. Trump, and that she claimed Mr. Trump had assaulted her in a violent and lurid encounter. The documents say the alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation.
The Times’s examination of a set of serial numbers on the individual pages in the public files suggests that more than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files. The missing materials were reported earlier by the journalist Roger Sollenberger on Substack and by NPR.
Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that when he reviewed unredacted versions of the Epstein files at the Justice Department on Monday, interview summaries related to the woman’s claim were also missing from that trove.
“Documents that are listed, which should be included, which are referenced in other documents, are not in the files,” Mr. Garcia said. He added that the Justice Department had also not provided them to the Oversight Committee, which issued a subpoena last year for all of the Justice Department’s investigative material regarding Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Garcia said the Justice Department had not provided a proper explanation for why the materials were missing. Democrats plan to open a separate investigation into why the documents are not available.
In the sole summary of the F.B.I. interview that was released, the woman told investigators that she did not know Mr. Epstein’s full identity until 2019, when a friend sent her a photograph of Mr. Epstein. She said she then recognized the person who she said had raped her.
The woman told the agents she still had the photo on her phone, and they noted that it was a widely distributed photo of Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump, according to the document. She gave the agents permission to take a photograph of the image but asked them to crop out Mr. Trump. When asked why, her lawyer interjected that the woman “was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation,” according to the F.B.I. memo.
It is unclear exactly what F.B.I. agents learned about her claims related to Mr. Trump in their three subsequent interviews.
The woman spent most of the interview on July 24, 2019, describing in detail what she said were repeated violent assaults by Mr. Epstein that she had endured, as reported earlier by The Post and Courier. She said that as a teenager in South Carolina, she was asked to babysit at a house on Hilton Head Island. But after she arrived, there were no children to babysit, and only a man she came to know as Jeff who she said plied her with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. She described him raping her on multiple occasions.
The woman joined a lawsuit later in 2019 against Mr. Epstein’s estate. She subsequently dropped her claim. Court records do not indicate if she received any financial settlement. A court record from 2021 said she was separately deemed ineligible for compensation from a fund set up for Epstein victims, but it did not specify why.
Julie Tate and Dylan Freedman contributed reporting.
Mike Baker is a national investigative reporter for The Times, based in Seattle.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 26, 2026, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Epstein Records Omit Full Claim Against Trump.
Our Coverage of Congress
Here’s the latest news and analysis from Capitol Hill.
Air Safety Bill: The House struck down aviation safety legislation that would have required planes to carry a type of tracking technology that federal investigators determined could have helped avoid a midair collision over the Potomac River last year that killed 67 people.
Tony Gonzales: The Texas Republican faced growing pressure to resign amid allegations that he had coerced a sexual relationship with a staff member who later killed herself.
House Republican Who Opposed Tariffs: President Trump yanked his endorsement of Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado, imperiling Republicans’ chances of holding onto his seat as they brace for midterm losses.
Voter I.D. Bill: Senate Republicans are coming under intense pressure from Trump and right-wing colleagues to embark on an old-fashioned filibuster fight in an effort to ram through a voter identification bill.
Islamophobic Post: Representative Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, is facing backlash after responding to a Palestinian organizer on social media by saying “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
More on the Epstein Files
Bob Kerrey: The former U.S. senator from Nebraska has resigned from the board of a clean energy start-up in the state after documents released by the Department of Justice indicated that Kerrey and Jeffrey Epstein had met and corresponded over email more than a decade ago.
Lawrence Summers: The Harvard University economist and the school’s former president will resign from teaching at the end of the academic year, according to a Harvard spokesman. The announcement comes after documents released by the Department of Justice showed a close relationship between Summers and Epstein long after Epstein was convicted of prostitution involving a minor.
Hillary Clinton: The former first lady, senator and secretary of state had no dealings with Epstein but is once again under pressure to answer for the actions and relationships of her husband.
Richard Axel: The Nobel Prize-winning scientist and professor announced that he was resigning as a co-director of a flagship neuroscience institute at Columbia University because of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Peter Mandelson: The arrest of the British former envoy to Washington, based on allegations that he passed confidential government information to Epstein, has deepened a scandal that has led to calls for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s resignation.
Microsoft: For more than two decades, Epstein developed a network at the tech giant, making him privy to succession discussions and other businesses.
No comments:
Post a Comment