The House is expected this week to adopt a bipartisan resolution mandating that all members and their staffs participate in anti-harassment and anti-discrimination training; the Senate has already adopted such a resolution. The more difficult task will be passing legislation that overhauls the way sexual harassment claims are handled.

In the House, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, and Representative Barbara Comstock, Republican of Virginia, is pushing for legislation that would require claims to be handled in public. In the Senate, Senator Kirstin Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, has put forth similar legislation.

“It was a system set up in 1995 to protect the harasser,” Ms. Speier said on the ABC program “This Week,” adding, “We say zero tolerance, but I don’t believe that we put our money where our mouths are.”

One major question, however, is whether the Speier-Comstock legislation should apply retroactively, meaning that those who have paid past settlements would now be identified. The legislation would cover any settlement reached since the beginning of this year.

While Mr. Portman said he would support retroactive releases, others, including Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, were more cautious, saying that unmasking lawmakers could reveal the identity of victims who want to remain private.

“All of these nondisclosure agreements have to go,” Ms. Pelosi said on “Meet the Press.” But, she said, “if the victim wants to be private, she can be.”

Debra Katz, a lawyer who represents victims of sexual harassment, echoed those concerns.

“For a number of my clients, that’s the last thing in the world they would want and could have life-altering consequences,” Ms. Katz said in an interview on Sunday. “They settled their cases to be able to move on with their lives while protecting their privacy.”

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In the case of Mr. Conyers, the lawyer Lisa Bloom, who announced on Sunday that she was representing the woman who filed the complaint against him, said a confidentiality agreement was preventing the woman from telling her side of the story. Ms. Bloom urged Mr. Conyers to release her client from the agreement so she could speak publicly.

News of Mr. Conyers’s settlement was reported last week by BuzzFeed News, which published documents showing that he had settled a complaint in 2015 by a former employee who had said she was fired because she rejected his sexual advances. The news site said it had received documents about the case from Mike Cernovich, a right-wing online commentator.

BuzzFeed has since reported that a second woman has also accused Mr. Conyers, 88, of sexual harassment.

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“I deny these allegations, many of which were raised by documents reportedly paid for by a partisan alt-right blogger,” Mr. Conyers said in a statement on Sunday. “I very much look forward to vindicating myself and my family before the House Committee on Ethics.”

Mr. Conyers said that he would “like very much to remain as ranking member,” but had “come to believe that my presence as ranking member on the committee would not serve these efforts while the Ethics Committee investigation is pending.”

His lawyer, Arnold E. Reed, said in a phone interview on Sunday that Mr. Conyers had taken several days to decide to step aside from his committee post because he did not want to make an “off the cuff” move. Mr. Conyers spoke with several family members and deliberated during the Thanksgiving holiday before determining that the allegations had become too much of a distraction, the lawyer said.

“He wanted time to think about this and reach a conclusion that he was comfortable with. And it was the right thing to do in his mind,” Mr. Reed said. “He is maintaining that he did not do anything wrong. He is maintaining his innocence. This is a temporary stepping aside his position as ranking member so this can be a completely transparent and unfettered investigation.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Reed had said in an interview that Mr. Conyers believed that some of those suggesting that he step down, including fellow Democrats, had been scheming for years to push him out of his Judiciary post.

A senior House Democratic aide said the decision had come after days of effort by Ms. Pelosi, who was working with Mr. Conyers to find a way for him to step aside gracefully. Ms. Pelosi hinted at as much on “Meet the Press,” where she said, before Mr. Conyers’s announcement, that she expected him to “do the right thing.”

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The interview showed the delicate position that Ms. Pelosi is in. She declined to say that Mr. Conyers should step down, calling him an “icon in our country” who had done “a great deal to protect women.” Ms. Pelosi later came under some criticism on social media for those remarks.

On Sunday night, 12 women who once worked for Mr. Conyers released a statement in support of him. “Our experiences with Mr. Conyers were quite different than the image of him being portrayed in the media,” the women said, adding that he was “respectful” and “treated us as professionals.”

Former Franken aides have also been coordinating an effort to line up women in support of him. On Sunday, they released a statement signed by 65 women that expressed disappointment over the allegations but called him a “steadfast supporter of women’s rights.”

Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who holds the recently created position of vice ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, praised Mr. Conyers for making a “wise decision,” adding, “The House is ready to clean house with respect to sexual harassment, and everybody agrees that we need to have a zero-tolerance policy.”

As Democrats wrestled with the allegations against Mr. Conyers and Mr. Franken, congressional Republicans on Sunday bemoaned President Trump’s support for Roy S. Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama who is accused of making unwanted advances on teenagers.

Many Republicans on Capitol Hill have called for Mr. Moore to step aside, but he has refused to do so. In a pair of tweets on Sunday, Mr. Trump warned that electing Mr. Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, “would be a disaster!” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, issued his own warning, saying that a victory by Mr. Moore would hurt Republicans just as much as a loss.

“If Moore wins, there will immediately be an ethics investigation, and he will be working under a cloud. He is a distraction,” Mr. Thune, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I would like to see the president come out and do what we’ve done, saying Moore should step aside.”

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The dispute has elevated Ms. English to a national spotlight. Before her appointment, she was a low-profile career civil servant who joined the agency in its infancy and rose steadily through its ranks, serving most recently as its chief of staff. She holds degrees from New York University and the London School of Economics, and previously held senior positions at the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created six years ago to oversee a wide variety of financial products, including mortgages, credit cards, bank accounts and student loans.

Under the leadership of Richard Cordray, the departing director, the bureau aggressively used its powers to develop new rules and punish companies that broke existing ones. It targeted abusive debt collectors and bolstered protections for mortgage borrowers. Under Mr. Cordray, it won nearly $12 billion in refunds and canceled debts for 29 million consumers.

But that put it in the cross hairs of industry critics and many Republicans, who cried overreach.

“Wall Street hates it like the devil hates holy water,” Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, told CNN on Sunday.

Republicans have argued that the agency under Mr. Cordray has held back growth and innovation. They have criticized how he ran the agency in dozens of appearances on Capitol Hill.

To protect the agency from political interference, Congress gave it unusual independence and autonomy. The bureau’s leader, who serves a five-year term, is one of the few federal officials the president cannot fire at will.

The current standoff was triggered by the resignation of Mr. Cordray, who abruptly stepped down on Friday. His departure came eight months before his term was scheduled to end.

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Ms. English, an agency veteran, was appointed to the deputy director position hours later. In a letter, Mr. Cordray said the appointment would make her the agency’s acting director under the terms of the law that created the agency.

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But Mr. Trump is citing a different federal law in his effort to appoint Mr. Mulvaney. The dueling appointments left it unclear who would be running the agency on Monday.

Ms. English is looking to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to resolve the dispute. The lawsuit she filed seeks a temporary injunction to halt Mr. Mulvaney’s appointment.

“The President’s attempt to appoint a still-serving White House staffer to displace the acting head of an independent agency is contrary to the overall statutory design and independence of the bureau,” Ms. English wrote in her lawsuit.

The White House and the consumer bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

Ms. English asked the court for an emergency restraining order to prevent Mr. Trump from naming an interim leader for the agency. She also asked it to declare that she, not Mr. Mulvaney, is the agency’s acting director.

Mr. Mulvaney would be a “wrecking ball” at the agency, said Lauren Saunders, the associate director of the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group.

As the fight between the White House and the consumer agency unfolded over the holiday weekend, many expected that it would end in court.

The legal grounds that the Trump administration cited for Mr. Mulvaney’s appointment — a law called the Federal Vacancies Reform Act — is “is at the very least contestable,” said Marty Lederman, a law professor at Georgetown formerly with the Justice Department.

Ms. English’s claim is based on the wording of the Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law that created the bureau. It specified that in the “absence or unavailability,” the bureau’s deputy director is to step in as its acting head.

The court will need to decide which law takes precedence.

“Everything about this situation is unusual,” said Deepak Gupta, Ms. English’s lawyer. Mr. Gupta is a former employee of the consumer bureau, who left in 2012 to start his own law firm.

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“All we’re asking for is a temporary restraining order to preserve the status quo,” he said. “We want to give the court time to consider the merits of both sides’ legal arguments. And while that happens, we think the appropriate thing is to leave Ms. English in place as the acting director.”

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The White House is preparing for a showdown over who will be the next leader of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a high-stakes battle that could end up in court and slow President Trump’s effort to roll back banking industry regulations.

Leadership of the agency, which Trump called a “total disaster” on Twitter Saturday, was thrown into doubt on an otherwise slow holiday weekend after the White House and the CFPB’s outgoing head both named acting directors to head the regulatory watchdog. On Friday, Trump named Mick Mulvaney, a longtime critic of the agency and the Office of Management and Budget director, while Richard Cordray promoted his chief of staff, Leandra English, to deputy director and said she would become acting director.

Both sides appeared to be preparing for a fight Saturday, including wading into the fine print of federal rules to bolster their position. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an eight-page opinion late in the day supporting Mulvaney’s appointment as temporary head of the agency, while other legal analysts called the move illegal.

“We think the clear legal authority is that the president does have this authority. We’ll find out based on how Ms. English decides to act at the appropriate time,” a senior administration official said in a call with reporters.

In a brief interview Saturday, Cordray disagreed. “The law authorized me to appoint a deputy director, and I did so. My understanding of the law is that the deputy director serves as the acting director upon my resignation. If there are disagreements about these issues, the appropriate place to settle them would be in the courts,” he said.

The battle, should it wind up in court, could turn into a roadblock to the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back financial regulations. While Trump has installed new leadership at the top of several other regulatory agencies, many of which have already taken a more business-friendly tone, the CFPB has continued to aggressively push rules that irked Wall Street. The agency has broad powers to regulate financial firms, from banks, credit card companies to payday lenders, and impose fines for wrongdoing.

The agency has often run afoul of conservatives for what the banking industry has complained is overly aggressive rulemaking. But it has been cheered by consumer advocates and Democrats for taking on big banks, including Wells Fargo, which it fined a record $100 million for opening millions of fake accounts customers didn’t ask for.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, has been a total disaster as run by the previous Administrations pick. Financial Institutions have been devastated and unable to properly serve the public. We will bring it back to life!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2017

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, has been a total disaster as run by the previous Administrations pick. Financial Institutions have been devastated and unable to properly serve the public. We will bring it back to life!,” Trump said of the six-year old agency Saturday. In another tweet, he referred to a Wall Street Journal editorial critical of the agency, and said Cordray had “just quit.”

Still, the agency’s fate remained unclear. “It appears that both Deputy Director English and OMB Director Mulvaney will walk in the door on Monday morning with the expectation of running the CFPB. We haven’t the faintest clue how that specific interaction will unfold, but our sense is that it could be a muddled mess,” Isaac Boltansky, a Washington policy analyst for the investment firm Compass Point Research Trading, said in a research note Saturday.

The White House has not spoken to English but expects her to show up to work Monday — as deputy director, said administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Mulvaney is working on a transition plan and will serve as the CFPB’s acting director until the Senate confirms a permanent replacement, they said. At the same time, he would remain as budget director.

“We don’t have any reason to think that anything out of the ordinary course will happen,” one senior administration said. “We think [Mulvaney] will show up Monday, and he will go into the office and start working.”

The White House hopes to avoid a legal battle, but is confident that its appointment of Mulvaney will stand up to scrutiny, senior administration officials said in a call with reporters Saturday morning.

“We have gone out of our way to avoid an unnecessary legal battle with Mr. Cordray,” a senior administration official said. “His actions clearly indicate that he is trying to provoke one.”

The tug-of-war over the leadership of the agency is likely to linger for some time. Democrats and consumer advocates say Mulvaney’s appointment is illegal and are calling on the Trump administration to allow English to serve until a permanent replacement is confirmed by the Senate.

Trump “can nominate the next @CFPB Director — but until that nominee is confirmed by the Senate, Leandra English is the Acting Director under the Dodd-Frank Act,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who helped establish the bureau and is one of its biggest supporters, said on Twitter.

Installing Mulvaney, even on a temporary basis, to lead the agency would quickly change its course. As a Republican congressman, Mulvaney called the CFPB a “joke . . . in a sick, sad way” and said it should be dissolved. Mulvaney’s experience running a large agency and time serving on the House Financial Services Committee qualified him for job, administration officials said.

Mulvaney’s appointment has already set off a wave of protest from consumer advocates who fear the former Republican House lawmaker would dismantle the agency. Lauren Saunders, associate director of the National Consumer Law Center, compared Mulvaney’s potential leadership of the agency to installing a “wrecking ball.”

“It is no joke to ordinary families to attempt to defang the one agency in Washington with the tools and independence to take on the Wall Street banks, giant credit reporting agencies, and predatory lenders that abuse the American public,” she said in a statement.

The fight over the agency’s future began Friday when Cordray announced that he was stepping down at midnight, a week earlier than expected, and promoted English to deputy director. In a letter announcing his decision, Cordray cited a section of 2010s Dodd-Frank Act that states a deputy director will “serve as acting director in the absence or unavailability of the director.”

[Richard Cordray dodges questions — again — about his political ambitions]

In addition to serving as CFPB’s chief of staff, English has been the agency’s deputy chief operating officer, the principal deputy chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, chief of staff and senior adviser to the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget. Her appointment will “ensure a smooth transition and operational stability at the agency,” Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, said in a statement.

The announcement was seen as a maneuver to delay a Trump administration takeover of the agency and a few hours later the White House named Mulvaney acting director. The president’s authority under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act supersedes the language in the Dodd-Frank legislation, administration officials said. “The fact that the Deputy Director may serve as Acting Director by operation of the state, however, does not displace the President’s authority under the Vacancies Reform Act,” Steven Engel, assistant attorney general, said in a letter released Saturday supporting the decision.

But one of the authors of Dodd-Frank, former congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), disputed that the administration’s reading of the law. “It is obvious,” Frank said in an interview. Lawmakers would not have included the succession language in the Dodd-Frank legislation if they intended for the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to supersede it, he said.

“If you look at the CFPB language it is very specific and it was designed to protect an agency that we knew would be under a lot of pressure,” said Frank. “This is an agency that enforces the rules against some of the most powerful financial interests in the country. Everything was structured for its independence.”

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner listens as President Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Nov. 1. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

A month ago, Jared Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser — made a surprise trip to Riyadh to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of a world leader who is making waves with crackdowns and modernization efforts.

Kushner, 36, flew commercial, and the White House only announced the visit once he was already on the ground. There were no news releases touting the specifics of his meetings, which included two days of one-on-one and small private audiences with Salman, 32. White House officials said the trip was part of Kushner’s effort as Trump’s adviser to build regional support for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Just days after Kushner landed back in Washington, Salman launched a purge of allegedly corrupt Saudi officials also seen as rivals to the prince and his father, King Salman. Kushner had no knowledge or advance warning of the move, and the topic was not natural for the two to discuss, a White House official close to him said. “Jared’s portfolio is Israeli-Palestinian peace, and he respects what his lane is,” the official said.

The journey revealed Kushner as a figure who seems both near the center of power and increasingly marginalized at the same time. His once-sprawling White House portfolio, which came with walk-in privileges to the Oval Office, has been diminished to its original scope under Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, and he has notably receded from public view.

His still-evolving role in the investigations of Russian election interference and possible obstruction of justice also make him a potential risk to President Trump, even as he enjoys the special status of being married to the boss’s daughter, Ivanka, and serving as one of the president’s senior confidants. Kushner’s family faces additional pressures over a troubled New York skyscraper at 666 Fifth Ave., which he purchased in his role as head of his family’s real estate business but from which he has divested since entering the administration.

[Kushner redevelopment plan for 666 Fifth Ave. deemed ‘not feasible’ by partner]

In a rare interview in his West Wing office earlier this month — a silver bowl of Halloween candy still on the table — Kushner offered his own version of the fable of the fox, who knows many things, and the hedgehog, who knows one important thing.

“During the campaign, I was more like a fox than a hedgehog. I was more of a generalist having to learn about and master a lot of skills quickly,” he said. “When I got to D.C., I came with an understanding that the problems here are so complex — and if they were easy problems, they would have been fixed before — and so I became more like the hedgehog, where it was more taking issues you care deeply about, going deep and devoting the time, energy and resources to trying to drive change.”

This portrait of Kushner comes from interviews with Kushner himself, as well as 12 senior administration officials, aides, outside advisers and confidants, some of them speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a more candid assessment. 

Kushner arrives before Trump and Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong speak at a news conference in the Rose Garden at the White House on Oct. 23. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Allies say Kushner’s subtle shift into the background of the West Wing reflects his natural inclination to work hard and eschew the limelight. His enemies gloat that it stems from avoidable missteps that resulted from his political naivete.

Following recent reports, which the White House denied, that the president privately blames Kushner for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s widening probe, ­Breitbart, the conservative website, snarkily dubbed him “Mr. Perfect.” The nickname originated from promotional material Kushner’s own family used, when trying to lure Chinese investors to their New Jersey real estate projects.

Some aides scoff at the notion that Kushner isn’t still whispering to the president about official business. But one of Kelly’s conditions for taking the job was that everyone, including Kushner and his wife, had to go through him to reach the president, and Kelly has made clear that Kushner reports to him, aides said. 

The new hierarchy is part of Kelly’s effort to sideline Kushner, said one Republican in frequent contact with the White House. Others say the order Kelly imposed has simply liberated Kushner to focus on his own portfolio — and eased some of the animosity his colleagues felt toward him. 

[Enforcer or ‘choke point’? Kelly seeks to bring order to chaotic White House]

Kushner said he welcomes the change. “The order allows this place to function,” Kushner said. “My number one priority is a high-functioning White House because I believe in the president’s agenda, and I think it should get executed.” 

He still maintains the broad portfolio he took on at the beginning of the administration that made him a punchline among aides on Capitol Hill: peace in the Middle East; matters regarding Canada, Mexico and China; and the Office of American Innovation, an in-house group that focuses on tackling longer-term government challenges.

He attends meetings of his innovation group once a week, often on a Tuesday or Wednesday for an hour-long check-in and progress update. The innovation office launched with great fanfare in March, but some aides recently said they could not pinpoint exactly what it has accomplished.

Ivanka Trump and husband Kushner listen as Trump speaks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Oct. 16. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Kushner and his allies reject that assessment, saying the office is focused on long-term projects. They say, for example, that the group helped the Department of Veterans Affairs launch their electronic medical records initiative in June, with Kushner expediting the process by calling Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and asking him to send people from his department to help.

“If I ever get into a roadblock, we just elevate it to Jared,” said Chris Liddell, a senior White House official who works in the innovation office. “He’s great at saying, ‘Can’t we get so-and-so to come over?’ And we get it done on the spot.”

Kushner is one of the advisers helping on negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement, and he accompanied Trump on the first half of his Asia trip earlier this month.

[Analysis: Jared Kushner’s quest for peace looks increasingly doomed]

But the main focus for Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, is working to bring peace to the Middle East — a task that has bedeviled negotiators far more experienced in the region for generations. What Kushner brings to the effort, say several senior White House officials, is personal relationships with players on all sides and a willingness to bet on long-shot outcomes.

Before Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with Trump at the White House in September, Kushner and Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt met him at the Mandarin Oriental for a two-hour breakfast. More recently, on Halloween, Kushner suggested that he and Greenblatt visit Saeb Erekat, the lead Palestinian peace negotiator, at the apartment in Virginia where he is recuperating from a lung transplant. After briefly considering, and then nixing, wine — Erekat is Muslim — Kushner ultimately brought chocolate.

Kushner flies over Baghdad with military personnel in April. (Reuters)

“This is very much a human conflict and a human-to-human relationship,” Greenblatt said. “When you’re able to touch somebody and talk about it, it’s a meaningful engagement. It takes a certain personality, and Jared has that touch.”

Yet snags persist. A week ago, the Palestinians threatened to freeze all contact with the Trump administration after the State Department said the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington could not remain open — a decision it backtracked on Friday.

And Kushner’s friendship with Mohammed bin Salman raised questions after the crown prince’s anti-corruption campaign — which critics paint as an attempt to consolidate power but devotees say is part of his efforts as a reformer — as well as concerns from some that Saudi Arabia now feels further emboldened within the region. 

[Jared Kushner turns out to be shadow diplomat on U.S.-Mexico talks]

The Mueller probe, meanwhile, is entering a new phase, with the special counsel announcing three indictments at the end of last month — including for Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort — while investigators begin to interview people close to the president’s inner circle. Kushner has turned over documents to the House and Senate committees investigating possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign, although in a letter, the Senate Judiciary Committee recently complained that Kushner had not been fully forthcoming — a charge his lawyer denies. 

So far, Mueller has filed no court documents to suggest Kushner is in legal jeopardy, but people close to the case say investigators have been looking at his meetings with Russians before and after the election, as well as his role in discussions that led to the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey.

The news on Thanksgiving that former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s lawyers notified Trump’s legal team that they could no longer share information about the Russia probe prompted speculation that Flynn may now be cooperating with Mueller — a potentially perilous sign for the president and his associates.

But friends say Kushner is even-keeled about the investigations. For him, they said, the most stressful moments came in May, amid news reports that he had tried to establish a secret back channel with Russia during the transition and that the FBI was probing his actions. He was frustrated, a White House official said, that he couldn’t respond to the allegations until he went to be interviewed by Congress.  

[When the Trump campaign and Russian actors overlapped]

“Jared is an extraordinarily calm person,” said H.R. McMaster, the White House national security adviser. “I have never seen him distracted.”

He huddled with his lawyers for hours in the run-up to his testimony before Congress but is in less frequent daily contact now unless something from Mueller’s probe specifically requires his attention, one White House official said. 

Kushner and national security adviser H.R. McMaster wait for Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to arrive for a Chinese opera performance at the Forbidden City on Nov. 8 in Beijing. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

Kushner’s detractors point to his role in the Russia probe as another sign of his poor political skills and continued risk to the president. A Republican close to the White House said Kushner “has no judgment — never has and never will.”

But in some ways, Kushner appears more protected from the daily sniping that plagued the early months of Trump’s presidency. Over the summer, a trio of advisers who were rivals to Kushner were pushed out of the West Wing: Stephen K. Bannon, then the president’s chief strategist, who now runs Breitbart; Reince Priebus, the chief of staff; and Sean Spicer, the press secretary. 

“He no longer is in an environment where he has an actual predator,” said one White House official, likening Kushner to Bannon’s regular prey. “That has probably helped his working environment some.” 

Kushner, with his whispery voice, has also proved one of the few people adept at absorbing Trump’s anger. He can speak to Trump in a shared language of transaction from their days in the New York real estate world. 

“I don’t try to manage him,” Kushner said. “I try to give him my honest feedback. If he asks my advice on something, sometimes I’ll give it, sometimes I’ll say, ‘Let me go call a few people,’ and then I’ll give it.” 

[‘A long winter’: White House aides divided over scope, risks of Russia probe]

McMaster said Kushner sometimes acts as a translator between the president and his senior advisers. “He helped a lot of us learn faster what’s important to the president,” McMaster said. “His relationship with the president makes Jared valuable as an adviser to the president, and also as an adviser to the president’s advisers.”

When Kushner’s family first arrived in Washington, they agreed they would assess after six months whether they intended to stay. Trump himself has mused privately about the hit his daughter and son-in-law’s reputation is taking because of their White House roles and about what a great and easy life they had back in New York. Others have questioned why someone like Kushner would put himself in Mueller’s crosshairs by remaining in government. 

But when the couple reassessed in July, they reached a decision. “We’re here to stay,” Kushner said. “At the current moment, we’re charging forward.”

He added, “My wife asked me the other day if we should be looking at new houses, so that’s a good sign.”

Yet he appeared to aspire to be on the magazine’s cover, with a fake 2009 cover story once hanging near the entrance of Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate where he is spending his vacation, and in many of his other golf clubs, according to a Washington Post article in June. (A White House spokeswoman declined at the time to say whether Mr. Trump had known that the cover wasn’t real.)

At the time of Mr. Trump’s tweet on Friday, an online readers poll on whom the magazine should select showed Mr. Trump in a three-way tie for second and trailing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who had 21 percent of the vote. The recipient of the title, who is ultimately decided by Time’s editors, will be announced on Dec. 6.

A spokeswoman for the magazine directed reporters back to Twitter. “The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year,” a message from the magazine’s account said. “TIME does not comment on our choice until publication, which is December 6.”

In between his bookends of institutional critique, the president fit in a few moments of international productivity on Friday.

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In an early-morning phone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Mr. Trump discussed the sale of American military equipment, the Syrian refugee crisis and “pending adjustments to the military support provided to our partners on the ground in Syria,” according to a summary provided by the White House.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry later said the pending adjustments meant that the United States would no longer provide weapons to the Y.P.G., a Kurdish militia fighting in Syria against the Islamic State — a military plan Mr. Trump had previously approved, according to reports from Turkish news media.

Mr. Trump’s decision to stop supplying the Syrian Kurds could ease tensions with Mr. Erdogan that have been aggravated by a number of issues, chief among them the Trump administration’s reluctance to turn over a Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and whom Mr. Erdogan accuses of fomenting a failed coup against him in 2016. The Turkish government is also angry over the case of an Iranian-Turkish businessman, Reza Zarrab, who is fighting federal charges in the United States that he evaded Iranian sanctions.

The United States began working closely with the Syrian Kurds during the Obama administration and continued under Mr. Trump. Some critics said on Friday that the decision to stop supplying them amounted to a betrayal, since American forces had relied on the Kurds, and their fighting skills, to retake the Syrian town of Raqqa from the Islamic State.

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Mr. Trump also made another phone call to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt to offer sympathy and support in the aftermath of the brutal militant attack on a Sufi mosque there Friday that killed at least 235 people.

But for the majority of the day, the president indulged in his favorite moments of relaxation: spending hours on his lush golf course in Jupiter, Fla., accompanied by the professional golfers Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson, staying mostly out of sight of the news media and sharing his commentary with his millions of Twitter followers. It appeared to be, as noted by the golfers and visitors who shared pictures of him on social media, a good day.

“Great spirits,” Eric Kaplan, a club member, observed on Twitter. “That is one gracious man.”

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Macy’s had hoped for a rush of shoppers on Black Friday. But it appears the crowds were too much of a good thing.

Macy’s credit card payment system buckled due to a higher than anticipated volume of transactions, the retailer said, leading to delays that slowed the checkout process at department stores around the country Friday.

The Cincinnati retailer said in a statement that the issue caused some transactions to take longer to process. Tweets by the department store to customers specified the issue affected credit and gift card transactions.

Macy’s said Friday afternoon that it had “fully resolved today’s system issues” and that it did not anticipate any additional delays.

Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has vowed to respond with “the utmost force” after 235 people were killed at a North Sinai mosque during Friday prayers.

The al-Rawda mosque in the town of Bir al-Abed was bombed and fleeing worshippers were then gunned down.

The Egyptian military has said it has conducted air strikes on “terrorist” targets in response.

No group has yet claimed the attack, the deadliest in recent memory.

Egyptian security forces have for years been fighting an Islamist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, and militants affiliated with so-called Islamic State (IS) have been behind scores of deadly attacks in the desert region.

They usually target security forces and Christian churches, and the bloody attack on a mosque associated with Sufi Muslims has shocked Egypt.

“What is happening is an attempt to stop us from our efforts in the fight against terrorism,” Mr Sisi said in a televised address hours after the attack.

“The armed forces and the police will avenge our martyrs and restore security and stability with the utmost force.”

Image copyright
AFP/getty

An army spokesman said “terrorist spots” where weapons and ammunition were reportedly stocked had been bombed by air force jets on Friday in response.

The official also said that several vehicles used in the attack had been located and destroyed.

Mr Sisi, the former head of Egypt’s armed forces, has emphasised national security and stability during his time as president.

Three days of national mourning have been declared.

What happened?

Dozens of gunmen surrounded the mosque in vehicles and opened fire on those trying to escape after bombs were set off.

The assailants are reported to have set parked vehicles on fire in the vicinity to block off access to the mosque, and they fired upon ambulances trying to help victims.

At least 100 people were wounded, reports say, overwhelming hospitals.

It is the deadliest militant attack in modern Egyptian history. Bir al-Abed is about 130 miles (211km) from Cairo.

Can Sisi curb a stubborn insurgency?

By Orla Guerin, Cairo correspondent

This is a major challenge to the Egyptian state.

If this was IS, it is always worth considering the broader regional dimension. In the last few months, IS has had massive territorial losses in Iraq and across the border in Syria.

If IS was behind this, this could be an attempt to remind supporters around the world that they are still here, still relevant and can still inflict terrible damage on their enemies.

What we don’t know right now is if the Egyptian security establishment, if President Sisi, has anything else in the arsenal to try.

He has already tried the hardline military approach – there has been a massive military operation going on in the Sinai peninsula for years. It has not delivered results that time and time again the Egyptian establishment has promised.

But it is unclear if they have something new they can try to attempt to curb this very stubborn Islamic insurgency which today has inflicted such terrible damage.

Who was targeted?

Locals are quoted as saying that followers of Sufism, a mystical branch of Sunni Islam, regularly gathered at the mosque.

Although Sufis are widely accepted across much of the Muslim world, some jihadist groups, including IS, see them as heretics.

• Egypt’s militant groups explained
• Sisi the strongman
• What is Sufism?

The head of IS’s “religious police” in Sinai said last December that Sufis who did not “repent” would be killed, after the group beheaded two elderly men reported to be Sufi clerics.

The victims of the mosque attack also included military conscripts.

The number of victims is unprecedented for an attack of this type, says the BBC’s Sally Nabil in Cairo. She adds that this is the first time that worshippers inside a mosque have been targeted by militants in North Sinai.

Image copyright
EPA

Who might be behind the attack?

Militant Islamists stepped up attacks in Sinai after Egypt’s military overthrew Islamist President Mohammed Morsi following mass anti-government protests in July 2013.

Hundreds of police, soldiers and civilians have been killed since then, mostly in attacks carried out by the Sinai Province group, which is affiliated to IS.

Sinai Province has also carried out deadly attacks against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority elsewhere in the country, and said it was behind the bombing of a Russian plane carrying tourists in Sinai in 2015, killing 224 people on board.

• Egypt disputes desert shootout reports
• Sinai plane crash: What we know
• The IS affiliate in Sinai

It has been operating mainly in North Sinai, which has been under a state of emergency since October 2014, when 33 security personnel were killed in an attack claimed by the group.

Sinai Province is thought to want to take control of the Sinai peninsula in order to turn it into an Islamist province run by IS.

Image copyright
Reuters

Journalists, including from state-sponsored outlets, have not been allowed to report from North Sinai in the last few years.

Correspondents say that the frequency of attacks raises doubts about the effectiveness of military operations against militants.

What has the reaction been internationally?

Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit condemned the attack as a “terrifying crime which again shows that Islam is innocent of those who follow extremist terrorist ideology”.

Governments in the UK, US, France, Russia, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have deplored the massacre.

Skip Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump

Will be calling the President of Egypt in a short while to discuss the tragic terrorist attack, with so much loss of life. We have to get TOUGHER AND SMARTER than ever before, and we will. Need the WALL, need the BAN! God bless the people of Egypt.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017

End of Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump

By Brad Lendon, Zachary Cohen and Steve George, CNN

Updated 9:12 AM ET, Thu November 23, 2017

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

It was a once-in-a-decade display of American firepower.

The aircraft carriers USS Ronald Reagan and USS Carl Vinson steam with their strike groups and ships from Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force during bilateral training in June.

Jan-31

Tuesday 31 January:
USS Antietam runs aground in Tokyo Bay

The USS Antietam, a guided-missile cruiser, damaged its propellers and spilled hydraulic oil into the water after running aground while the ship was anchoring in Tokyo Bay.

May-9

Tuesday 9 May:
USS Lake Champlain collides with South Korean fishing boat

The guided-missile cruiser was struck by a 60- to 70-foot-long South Korean fishing boat while conducting operations in international waters near the Korean Peninsula, the Navy said.

June-17

Saturday 17 June:
USS Fitzgerald collides with Philippine cargo ship

The collision between the Fitzgerald, a guided-missile destroyer, and the ACX Crystal on June 17 claimed the lives of seven US sailors. It took place 56 nautical miles off the coast of Honshu, Japan, in an area heavily traveled by commercial shipping.

Aug-21

Monday 21 August:
USS John S McCain collides with oil tanker off Singapore

The US guided-missile destroyer collided with a Liberian oil tanker in crowded shipping lanes off Singapore, leaving 10 US sailors dead and five more injured. The accident left a large highly visible hole in the US ship.

Nov-18

Saturday 18 November:
USS Benfold struck by Japanese tugboat

The guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold was struck by a Japanese tugboat while participating in a scheduled towing exercise off Japan. The tug boat lost propulsion and drifted into the US ship, the Navy said. No one was injured.

F/A-18 Hornets fly over US and South Korean warships during an exercise off the Korean Peninsula.

F/A-18 Hornets fly off the carrier USS Carl Vinson off the Korean Peninsula in March. US officials say they’ve had to scavenge parts to keep the F/A-18s flyable.

The US 7th Fleet this year has participated in about 160 exercises with other countries, including this one with Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force.

The littoral combat ship USS Coronado fires a Harpoon missile during Exercise Pacific Griffin, conducted with the Singaporean navy.