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By Eric Bradner, Kevin Liptak, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Monday he recommended to South Carolina’s governor that Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, be appointed to serve in the late lawmaker’s seat after he suddenly died over the weekend.

“I recommended, to Governor Henry McMaster, Lindsey Graham’s wonderful sister, Darline, to serve as interim Senator from the Great State of South Carolina,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “This would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!”

Under state law, McMaster can appoint a temporary replacement to fill Graham’s vacant seat. But because Graham was up for reelection this year, his death will kick off a sprint primary election to replace him on the November ballot.

McMaster has scheduled a 4 p.m. ET press conference to announce his pick. Ahead of the press conference, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN’s Dana Bash that he spoke Sunday with both Nordone and McMaster.

“I’ll let the governor make an announcement about that, but that certainly in my view makes a lot of sense,” Thune said. “In many respects, it would be a way of extending Lindsey’s legacy here and certainly something that, if that’s what they decide to end up doing, I think there’d be a lot of support for it.”

The governor and Trump are longtime allies. Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail that he nominated South Carolina’s former governor, Nikki Haley, as his US ambassador to the United Nations in his first term to elevate McMaster, who was then the lieutenant governor.

Who is Darline Graham Nordone?

Graham and his sister were close their entire lives, his sister told CNN’s Dana Bash in a 2015 interview after her brother launched his bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

“Even when my parents were alive, they worked really long, hard hours running a small business. So even then, he was a caregiver to me,” she said.

The same year, the unmarried Graham was asked by the Daily Mail Online who would be his first lady.

“Well, I’ve got a sister. She could play that role if necessary,” he said.

The two grew up in a single room behind the Sanitary Cafe — a bar, pool hall and liquor store their parents ran in Central, South Carolina.

After their parents died within 15 months of each other, Darline became orphaned at age 13 in 1976. Graham — the first in his family to attend college, and a member of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps — became Darline’s legal guardian. That enabled Darline to access her brother’s military benefits, she told CNN in 2015.

She said being adopted by her brother “was a little odd” at first, but she came to understand “it makes perfect sense.”

“I knew he was doing what he could to

By Annie Grayer, CNN

(CNN) — US Capitol Police arrested a man at the Capitol’s north barricade who they said had a firearm, which is prohibited on Capitol grounds.

CNN captured video of the man being taken into custody. It shows six officers surrounding an SUV, two of whom have their guns drawn and pointed at a man emerging from the driver’s side with his hands above his head.

The man walks backward away from his car and officers lower their weapons. Then a group approaches the man and cuff his hands behind his back, as more officers arrive on the scene.

The man appears to talk with one officer, who gestures toward the inside of the vehicle. A dog sitting inside the vehicle barks at an officer through an open window.

Capitol Police said the north barricade would be closed while they investigate, and staff and other personnel were advised to avoid the area.

Police did not identify the man who was taken into custody.

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By Tal Shalev, CNN

(CNN) — The commemoration of Israel’s most famous military operation should have been a moment to celebrate for Matan Vilnai. Instead, the deputy commander of the Entebbe raid – in which commandos rescued 102 hostages – boycotted the ceremony, along with many of the soldiers who took part in the daring mission.

“What exactly is there to celebrate – an operation from 50 years ago? I haven’t celebrated since October 7,” Vilnai, a retired general from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN. “We have thousands of soldiers fighting right now, thousands of reservists serving – and they’re celebrating?”

On July 4, 1976, Israeli commandos flew nearly 2,500 miles across largely hostile airspace, landing in darkness at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda. In less than an hour, they freed 102 hostages held by Palestinian and German hijackers who were demanding the release of dozens of convicted terrorists. The plane had been hijacked en route from Tel Aviv to Paris and diverted to Entebbe.

Three hostages were killed during the operation, as was its 30-year-old commander, Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu, who became a national icon. Operation Thunderbolt – known in Hebrew as the Entebbe raid – was subsequently renamed in Netanyahu’s honor as “Operation Yonatan.”

Entebbe became one of the defining moments in Israel’s national story, a symbol of a country’s promise to go anywhere, and take extraordinary risks, to protect its citizens and bring them home.

It also marks the beginning of another story: that of Netanyahu’s younger brother, Benjamin, who entered public life in the shadow of Yoni’s death and would become Israel’s longest serving prime minister.

Half a century later, that legacy is fraught, mirroring Israel’s deep internal divisions. At a state ceremony marking the anniversary on Sunday, dozens of the operation’s own veterans – senior commanders and commando soldiers who stormed the airport that night, and even some of the hostages they saved – boycotted the event, hosted by President Isaac Herzog, in protest of its guest of honor: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“There isn’t a day I don’t think about Yoni, there isn’t a day that I don’t consult with Yoni,” Netanyahu said at the ceremony, connecting the Entebbe raid to Israel’s campaign against Iran. The 1976 operation, he said, “turned the impossible into possible” and demonstrated that terrorism must be confronted with force. “This is what we are doing. We are systematically crushing the Iranian axis of evil, who tried to advance a plan to destroy Israel.”

But most of the men who once served beside his brother were not there to hear his speech.

“We refuse to serve as a window dressing,” the veterans wrote in an open letter, accusing Netanyahu of “abandoning” the Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and of enabling mass draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, even as reservists serve repeated combat tours on multiple fronts.

“This is a matter of conscience,” Uri Sagi, a former military intelligence chief who commanded Golani forces in the 1976 raid, wrote on social media, explaining his refusal to sit alongside Netanyahu. Benny Davidson, who was 13 when he was rescued from Entebbe, also avoided the ceremony, saying he would not be part of “a display that covers a collapse of values and leadership.” Instead, he led a small, quiet protest outside the president’s residence.

The rift between Netanyahu and some of his brother’s former comrades has become increasingly open. In 2023, at the height of mass protests against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, members of the Entebbe rescue squad staged a demonstration at Ben Gurion airport, arriving in black Mercedes cars like the ones the commandos drove onto the Entebbe tarmac at the start of the operation.

“Back then we set out on ‘Operation Yonatan’; today we embark on ‘Operatio

By Tierney Sneed, Holmes Lybrand, CNN

(CNN) — A federal judge Monday said a controversial lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump against the IRS sought to “manipulate the judicial process” and that he acted in bad faith in bringing it.

US District Judge Kathleen Williams is ordering sanctions for the attorneys involved in the lawsuit, which led to an attempt to create the now-defunct $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund for allies of the president. It was also used to justify a Trump administration order giving Trump and his businesses amnesty for any past tax issues.

Williams’ 56-page opinion blasted the behavior of both the Justice Department — arguing that the administration’s response to the case disregarded DOJ policies and potentially the law — and of the private attorneys who brought the lawsuit on Trump’s behalf.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” the judge wrote.

She ordered that her opinion be submitted to attorney disciplinary boards in in New York and Washington, DC, that are currently reviewing pre-existing professional ethics complaints against acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward.

“In abdicating its responsibility to zealously defend the interests of the United States, the Government entered into a ‘settlement’ that deviated from its litigation posture in similar actions, disregarded DOJ policies, and accomplished objectives beyond those authorized, as well as those specifically prohibited, by law,” Williams wrote.

The judge also referred one of the private attorneys who represented Trump in the case to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary proceedings and blocked another lawyer who represented Trump from entering court appearances in the Southern District of Florida for the next year.

Her order indicates that the retired judges who argued she should scrutinize the deal could be entitled to having their legal fees covered.

CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

A spokesman for Trump’s private legal team said: “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

This story is breaking and will be updated.

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