WASHINGTON (AP) — Stephen Miran, President Donald Trump’s pick to join the Federal Reserve Board, said Thursday that he would remain a White House employee even if the Senate confirms him to fill an unexpired term at the central bank.
Miran, who was nominated to fill a gubernatorial term set to expire in January, made the disclosure at a hearing before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.
He said that on the advice of his lawyers he would take an “unpaid leave of absence” as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Miran later said he would only resign from the Republican administration if he were nominated for a longer term at the Fed.
His answer instantly triggered alarm bells about the Fed's independence, suggesting that the central bank could ultimately become subservient to Trump's whims instead of its congressional mandates to keep prices stable and maximize employment. Political control of the Fed could erode the faith that the American population and investors worldwide place in the U.S. economy, which could threaten global markets and national prosperity.
Democrats blasted Miran’s plan to keep his day job at the White House.
“Your independence has already been seriously compromised,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said. “You are going to be technically an employee of the president of the United States but an independent member of the board of the Federal Reserve. That’s ridiculous.”
Miran’s hearing reflected the broader battle over Trump’s efforts to gain control of the Fed. Because of the possible negative impacts on the economy, the Fed has tried to act based on the economic data rather than electoral considerations.
Trump, however, has engaged in a prolonged campaign of pressuring and mocking Fed Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting the benchmark interest rate to Trump’s liking, a move that could end up pumping more money into the economy and creating greater inflationary risks. The Fed has yet to reach its 2% inflation target and has held its rates steady in part because of the uncertainties created by Trump’s import taxes.
The president has also sought to apply pressure on the Fed over its renovation of its headquarters and other buildings and has tried to fire Lisa Cook as a Fed governor over allegations that she committed mortgage fraud. Cook has said she will not resign and has sued to overturn Trump's move, but on Thursday the Justice Department had started examining the allegations against her.
Miran, in his answers to senators, played down the controversy over Trump’s desire to control the Fed. Miran said that if he were confirmed to fill the rest of Adriana Kugler’s term, he would act based on his own judgments about inflation and employment.
“Look, the president nominated me because I have policy views, that, I suppose that he liked,” he said told the committee chairman, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. “If I’m confirmed to this role, I will act independently, as the Federal Reserve always does, based on my own personal analysis of economic data.”
Even Republicans saw the risks to the loss of Fed independence. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., asked Miran to commit to “ignore all the rhetoric from all politicians” and make his own choices.
But Miran arrives with the baggage of having worked for a president who has expressed disdain for the Fed's tradition of independence. Trump has argued that he knows more about monetary policy as he has called for the Fed’s benchmark rate to be cut by a full 3 percentage points.
In June, a Fed forecast of future rates showed emerging divisions among the policymakers. Seven projected no rate cuts at all this year, two indicated one cut and 10 forecast at least two reductions.
“This is a crisis moment for the Federal Reserve, for the financial system and for the economic stability of families all across this country,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told reporters before the start of the hearing.
Warren added that the Fed board’s “independence and their efforts to make decisions based on what’s really happening in the economy — not what the politics are — is something that benefits every single American. Donald Trump wants to burn that to the ground.”
Under questioning by Warren, Miran declined to say whether Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, saying only that Congress certified Biden as president. Miran declined under questioning to contradict Trump’s unfounded claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had faked jobs numbers for political reasons.
Trump fired the bureau's head after severe revisions to the July employment report showed the economy was potentially weaker than Trump's claims of a “golden age.”
There are also questions about how Miran interprets the Fed's independence. He said that the president is entitled to express his opinion on monetary policy and that consideration of climate change as an economic force by Fed officials would be a politicization of the central bank.
In a 2024 paper he co-wrote for the Manhattan Institute, Miran argued that the Fed was already politicized by “highly political, personnel who move freely between the White House” and the central bank’s headquarters.
In that same paper, Miran wanted to heighten presidential control, saying that having Fed board members serve at the will of the president would confer “greater democratic legitimacy” on the Fed.
By indicating that he could return to the White House, Miran seemed to undermine one of his own recommendations in his paper.
“To further insulate board members from the day-to-day political process, they should be prohibited from serving in the executive branch for four years following the end of their term,” the paper said.
FILE - Stephen Miran, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, walks at the White House, June 17, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
LONDON (AP) — With one puff of a cigarette, a woman in Canada became a global symbol of defiance against Iran's bloody crackdown on dissent — and the world saw the flame.
A video that has gone viral in recent days shows the woman — who described herself as an Iranian refugee — snapping open a lighter and setting the flame to a photo she holds. It ignites, illuminating the visage of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's highest cleric. Then the woman dips a cigarette into the glow, takes a quick drag — and lets what remains of the image fall to the pavement.
Whether staged or a spontaneous act of defiance — and there’s plenty of debate — the video has become one of the defining images of the protests in Iran against the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, as U.S. President Donald Trump considers military action in the country again.
The gesture has jumped from the virtual world to the real one, with opponents of the regime lighting cigarettes on photos of the ayatollah from Israel to Germany and Switzerland to the United States.
In the 34 seconds of footage, many across platforms like X, Instagram and Reddit saw one person defy a series of the theocracy’s laws and norms in a riveting act of autonomy. She wears no hijab, three years after the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests against the regime’s required headscarves.
She burns an image of Iran’s supreme leader, a crime in the Islamic republic punishable by death. Her curly hair cascades — yet another transgression in the Iranian government’s eyes. She lights a cigarette from the flame — a gesture considered immodest in Iran.
And in those few seconds, circulated and amplified a million times over, she steps into history.
In 2026, social media is a central battleground for narrative control over conflicts. Protesters in Iran say the unrest is a demonstration against the regime’s strictures and competence. Iran has long cast it as a plot by outsiders like United States and Israel to destabilize the Islamic Republic.
And both sides are racing to tell the story of it that will endure.
Iranian state media announces wave after wave of arrests by authorities, targeting those it calls “terrorists” and also apparently looking for Starlink satellite internet dishes, the only way to get videos and images out to the internet. There was evidence on Thursday that the regime’s bloody crackdown had somewhat smothered the dissent after activists said it had killed at least 2,615 people. That figure dwarfs the death toll from any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the mayhem of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Social media has bloomed with photos of people lighting cigarettes from photos of Iran’s leader. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em. #Iran,” posted Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana.
In the age of AI, misinformation and disinformation, there’s abundant reason to question emotionally and politically charged images. So when “the cigarette girl” appeared online this month, plenty of users did just that.
It wasn’t immediately clear, for example, whether she was lighting up inside Iran or somewhere with free-speech protections as a sign of solidarity. Some spotted a background that seemed to be in Canada. She confirmed that in interviews. But did her collar line up correctly? Was the flame realistic? Would a real woman let her hair get so close to the fire?
Many wondered: Is the “cigarette girl” an example of “psyops?” That, too, is unclear. That’s a feature of warfare and statecraft as old as human conflict, in which an image or sound is deliberately disseminated by someone with a stake in the outcome. From the allies’ fake radio broadcasts during World War II to the Cold War’s nuclear missile parades, history is rich with examples.
The U.S. Army doesn’t even hide it. The 4th Psychological Operations Group out of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina last year released a recruitment video called, “Ghost in the Machine 2 that’s peppered with references to “PSYWAR.”And the Gaza war featured a ferocious battle of optics: Hamas forced Israeli hostages to publicly smile and pose before being released, and Israel broadcast their jubilant reunions with family and friends.
Whatever the answer, the symbolism of the Iranian woman's act was powerful enough to rocket around the world on social media — and inspire people at real-life protests to copy it.
The woman did not respond to multiple efforts by The Associated Press to confirm her identity. But she has spoken to other outlets, and AP confirmed the authenticity of those interviews.
On X, she calls herself a “radical feminist” and uses the handle Morticia Addams —- after the exuberantly creepy matriarch of “The Addams Family” — sheerly out of her interest in “spooky things,” the woman said in an interview with the nonprofit outlet The Objective.
She doesn’t allow her real name to be published for safety reasons after what she describes as a harrowing journey from being a dissident in Iran — where she says she was arrested and abused — to safety in Turkey. There, she told The Objective, she obtained a student visa for Canada. Now, in her mid-20s, she said she has refugee status in and lives in Toronto.
It was there, on Jan. 7, that she filmed what’s become known as “the cigarette girl” video a day before the Iranian regime imposed a near-total internet blackout.
“I just wanted to tell my friends that my heart, my soul was with them,” she said in an interview on CNN-News18, a network affiliate in India.
In the interviews, the woman said she was arrested for the first time at 17 during the “bloody November” protests of 2019, demonstrations that erupted after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal that Iran had struck with world powers that imposed crushing sanctions.
“I was strongly opposed to the Islamic regime,” she told The Objective. Security forces “arrested me with tasers and batons. I spent a night in a detention center without my family knowing where I was or what had happened to me.” Her family eventually secured her release by offering a pay slip for bail. “I was under surveillance from that moment on.”
In 2022 during the protests after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody, she said she participated in a YouTube program opposing the mandatory hijab and began receiving calls from blocked numbers threatening her. In 2024, after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, she shared her story about it — and was arrested in her home in Isfahan.
The woman said she was questioned and “subjected to severe humiliation and physical abuse.” Then without explanation, she was released on a high bail. She fled to Turkey and began her journey to Canada and, eventually, global notoriety.
“All my family members are still in Iran, and I haven’t heard from them in a few days,” she said in the interview, published Tuesday. “I’m truly worried that the Islamic regime might attack them.”
A demonstrator lights a cigarette with a burning poster depicting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a rally in support of Iran's anti-government protests, in Holon, Israel Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)
CORRECTS MONTH - A protester lights a cigarette off a burning poster of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a demonstration in Berlin, Germany, in support of the nationwide mass protests in Iran against the government, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
A protester burns an image of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with a cigarette during rally in support of the nationwide mass demonstrations in Iran against the government, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026 in Zuerich, Switzerland.(Michael Buholzer /Keystone via AP)
