National security officials are quietly working to convince House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of the risks her potential trip to Taiwan could pose during a highly sensitive moment between the self-governing island and China.

Sources familiar with the speaker’s plans say she is planning to visit in the coming weeks as part of a broader trip to Asia and has invited both Democrats and Republicans to accompany her. If she goes, she would be the first House speaker to visit in a quarter century.

The possible trip is highlighting the concerns within President Joe Biden’s administration over China’s designs on Taiwan as Beijing has stepped up its rhetoric and aggressive actions toward the island in recent months, including sending warplanes into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense identification zone several times. US officials have expressed concern that those moves could be precursors to even more aggressive steps by China in the coming months meant to assert its authority over the island.

The war in Ukraine has only intensified those worries, as Biden and other top officials nervously watch to see what lessons China may be taking from the Western response to Russia’s aggression.

Meanwhile, China’s President Xi Jinping — with whom Biden expects to speak this week — is believed to be laying the groundwork for an unprecedented third term as president in the fall, contributing to the tense geopolitics in the region. Biden’s call with Xi was in the works before Pelosi’s potential visit to Taiwan became public, officials noted.

Administration officials have shared their concerns not only about Pelosi’s security during the trip, but also worries about how China may respond to such a high-profile visit. With China recently reporting its worst economic performance in two years, Xi finds himself in a politically sensitive place ahead of an important meeting regarding extending his reign and could use a political win, multiple officials told CNN.

While Biden’s aides have ideas about how he could potentially respond, they aren’t sure which direction the Chinese leader will choose.

It is against that highly charged backdrop that Pelosi has proposed visiting Taiwan with a congressional delegation, a trip that she has so far declined to confirm publicly. But that has not stopped China from lashing out, saying a visit would violate US policy toward the island.

China’s Ministry of National Defense on Tuesday said Pelosi’s trip should be canceled, warning that China’s military would “resolutely defend national sovereignty” if faced with “external forces” encouraging Taiwanese independence.

“China demands the US take concrete actions to fulfill its commitment not to support ‘Taiwan independence’ and not to arrange for Pelosi to visit Taiwan,” Ministry of Defense Spokesperson Tan Kefei said Tuesday in response to questions over Pelosi’s reported trip to Taipei.

“If the US insists on taking its own course, the Chinese military will never sit idly by, and it will definitely take strong actions to thwart any external force’s interference and separatist’s schemes for ‘Taiwan independence,’ and resolutely defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Tan added.

Because Pelosi is in the presidential line of succession, the administration takes extra care for her security when she travels overseas, the White House said Tuesday.

That includes establishing a footprint on the ground based on the location and environment, sometimes using military resources, according to John Kirby, the communications coordinator at the National Security Council.

“We take those obligations seriously,” Kirby said, even as he reiterated Pelosi has not announced any travel plans to visit Taiwan.

Administration lays out the risks for Pelosi

Behind the scenes, Biden administration officials have been working to spell out the potential risks of a visit in meetings with Pelosi and her team.

Pentagon officials briefed the speaker last week about Taiwan and the heightened tensions in the region, according to people familiar with the matter. White House officials were also present for the briefing.

The President let slip last week that the US military was opposed to Pelosi visiting Taiwan now, but the White House has refused to expand on his comments. Even Pelosi said during a news conference last week that she wasn’t sure precisely what Biden meant.

“I think what the President was saying is that maybe the military was afraid of my plane of getting shot down or something like that. I don’t know exactly,” she said.

The White House said Tuesday it was providing Pelosi information about her potential travel.

“I’ll let the speaker talk about her travel plans. Our job is, of course, to make sure she has all the context and information before she travels anywhere. But that kind of rhetoric coming out of the Chinese side is clearly unhelpful and not necessary,” Kirby said on CNN’s “New Day.”

“There’s no call for that kind of escalatory rhetoric,” Kirby added. “Again, none of this has to devolve into conflict. Nothing’s changed about our policies with respect to One China or supporting Taiwan’s ability to defend itself. So, there’s no reason for this to be escalated, even just in rhetoric.”

Potential trip comes at tense moment in China

Administration officials are concerned Pelosi’s trip comes at a particularly tense moment, as Xi is expected to seek an unprecedented third term at the upcoming Chinese Communist Party congress. Chinese party officials are expected to begin laying the groundwork for that conference in the coming weeks, putting pressure on the leadership in Beijing to show strength.

Officials also believe the Chinese leadership don’t completely grasp the political dynamics in the United States, leading to a misunderstanding over the significance of Pelosi’s potential visit. The officials say China may be confusing Pelosi’s visit with an official administration visit, since she and Biden are both Democrats. Administration officials are concerned that China doesn’t separate Pelosi from Biden much, if at all.

Instead, the politics surrounding the potential trip have become somewhat reversed. A number of Republicans have encouraged Pelosi to go ahead with her plans, arguing it would be a strong stand against China, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“Nancy, I’ll go with you. I’m banned in China, but not freedom-loving Taiwan. See you there!” Pompeo tweeted this week.

Pelosi has long cultivated a tough-on-China stance. She issued a strong statement in June on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre reminding everyone she helped unfurl a banner there two years after the massacre reading, “To those who died for democracy in China.”

Biden looks for stability

Biden, who has sought to stabilize ties with China through regular conversations with his counterpart, is planning a phone conversation with Xi this week in which the issue of Taiwan could likely arise.

He last spoke to Xi in March, when he worked to convince the Chinese leader not to support Russia amid its invasion of Ukraine. Officials have been watching closely how Beijing responds to the invasion, hoping the mostly united Western response — including a withering set of economic sanctions and billions of dollars in arms shipments — proves illuminating as China considers its actions toward Taiwan.

Kirby indicated Tuesday that China is observing the global response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as it plots next steps in Taiwan, saying, “I’m sure they’re watching this in real time” but that there was “no reason for this to devolve into any kind of conflict.”

US officials believe there’s a small risk China would miscalculate in responding to a Pelosi visit. Biden administration officials are concerned that China could seek to declare a no-fly zone over Taiwan ahead of a possible visit as an effort to upend the trip, potentially raising tensions even further in the region, a US official told CNN.

That remains a remote possibility, officials said. More likely, they say, is the possibility China steps up flights further into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense zone, which could trigger renewed discussions about possible responses from Taiwan and the US, the US official added. They did not detail what those possible responses would entail.

While the administration has not, and does not, plan to officially tell the speaker not to travel to Taiwan, officials have been frank in the briefings about the risks associated with a trip. People familiar with the matter say their hope is to quietly convince Pelosi of the trip’s risks without explicitly telling her not to go.

In the end, the speaker will make her own decision, Biden officials noted.

CNN’s Kylie Atwood, Barbara Starr, Betsy Kelin, Yong Xiong and Hannah Ritchie contributed to this report.

The Biden administration is working furiously behind the scenes to keep European allies united against Russia as Moscow further cuts its energy supplies to the European Union, prompting panic on both sides of the Atlantic over potentially severe gas shortages heading into winter, US officials say.

On Monday, Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom said it would cut flows through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to Germany in half, to just 20% of its capacity. A US official said the move was retaliation for western sanctions, and that it put the West in “unchartered territory” when it comes to whether Europe will have enough gas to get through the winter.

In response to the turmoil, the White House dispatched presidential coordinator for global energy Amos Hochstein to Europe on Tuesday, officials said. He will be traveling to Paris and Brussels to discuss contingency planning with the US-EU energy task force created in March, one month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“This was our biggest fear,” said the US official. The impact on Europe could boomerang back onto the US, spiking natural gas and electricity prices, the official said. It will also be a major test of European resilience and unity against Russia, as the Kremlin shows no signs of retreating from Ukraine.

The US and Brussels have been pleading with EU members to save gas and store it for winter, and on Tuesday, energy ministers agreed in principle to cut gas use by 15% from August to March.

There will also be discussions in the coming days about increasing nuclear power production across Europe to offset gas shortages, officials said. Germany was planning to completely phase out its use of nuclear power by the end of 2022, but US officials are hoping to convince Berlin to extend the life of its three remaining nuclear power plants amid the energy crisis, an official said.

US officials, who have been in close touch in particular with German and French officials on this topic, are extremely concerned that Europe might face a serious gas shortage going into winter. That is because EU countries will struggle to fill their reserves over the next few months with Nord Stream 1 providing only a fraction of its capacity.

Germany scrapped plans for another Russia-Europe gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, after Russia invaded Ukraine in February. The US was opposed to that pipeline, warning that it would only increase European dependency on Russian gas. But Germany argued that the pipeline was a purely commercial project, and that it could serve as an energy bridge as it phased out nuclear and coal. The US ultimately issued waivers allowing the pipeline project to move forward without crippling sanctions.

Now, officials said a 15% cut in Europe’s gas consumption, along with a surge of global liquefied natural gas exports to Europe, including from the US, is unlikely to be enough to offset the shortages.

“This is an open gas war that Russia is waging against a united Europe,” Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky said on Tuesday. The US official said it was clear the Russians are “lashing out” and trying to “destabilize Europe” because they are not achieving their goals in Ukraine.

A National Security Council spokesperson called Russia’s moves just its latest attempts “to use natural gas as a political and economic weapon.”

“Russia’s energy coercion has put pressure on energy markets, raised prices for consumers, and threatened global energy security. These actions only underscore the importance of the work the United States and the European Commission are doing to end our reliance on Russian energy,” the spokesperson said. “We will continue working with our European partners to reduce dependence on Russian energy and support their efforts to prepare for further Russian destabilization of energy markets.”

Chief Justice John Roberts privately lobbied fellow conservatives to save the constitutional right to abortion down to the bitter end, but May’s unprecedented leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade made the effort all but impossible, multiple sources familiar with negotiations told CNN.

It appears unlikely that Roberts’ best prospect – Justice Brett Kavanaugh – was ever close to switching his earlier vote, despite Roberts’ attempts that continued through the final weeks of the session.

New details obtained by CNN provide insight into the high-stakes internal abortion-rights drama that intensified in late April when justices first learned the draft opinion would soon be published. Serious conflicts over the fate of the 1973 Roe were then accompanied by tensions over an investigation into the source of the leak that included obtaining cell phone data from law clerks and some permanent court employees.

In the past, Roberts himself has switched his vote, or persuaded others to do so, toward middle-ground, institutionalist outcomes, such as saving the Affordable Care Act. It’s a pattern that has generated suspicion among some right-wing justices and conservatives outside the court.

Multiple sources told CNN that Roberts’ overtures this spring, particularly to Kavanaugh, raised fears among conservatives and hope among liberals that the chief could change the outcome in the most closely watched case in decades. Once the draft was published by Politico, conservatives pressed their colleagues to try to hasten release of the final decision, lest anything suddenly threaten their majority.

Roberts’ persuasive efforts, difficult even from the start, were thwarted by the sudden public nature of the state of play. He can usually work in private, seeking and offering concessions, without anyone beyond the court knowing how he or other individual justices have voted or what they may be writing.

Kavanaugh had indicated during December oral arguments that he wanted to overturn Roe and CNN learned that he voted that way in a private justices’ conference session soon afterward. But the 2018 appointee of former President Donald Trump who had been confirmed by the Senate only after expressing respect for Roe has wavered in the past and been open to Roberts’ persuasion.

The two men have known each other since the early 1990s when they both worked in the George H.W. Bush administration. Roberts, who is 67 and 10 years older than Kavanaugh, was a deputy US solicitor general at the time, and Kavanaugh, a new attorney.

They share similar Roman Catholic roots, prep school backgrounds and Ivy League educations (Roberts, Harvard; Kavanaugh, Yale). They now live so close to each other in Maryland that abortion rights protesters sometimes go to both homes on the same evening.

Conservatives anticipated Roberts’ actions

The high court’s June 24 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization struck America like a thunderbolt, despite the leaked preview on May 2. The decision has caused confusion among women and health care providers and spurred action in state legislatures – some trying to impose more restrictions on pregnant women, some trying to safeguard reproductive rights.

It has unsettled the court in its own way, as the 5-4 ruling represented a startling departure from a half century of precedent.

The final decision flouted the court’s traditional adherence to judicial restraint and precedent. Polls show public approval of the court falling significantly, as the decision has been regarded as a product of politics rather than neutral decision-making.

Roberts’ efforts directed toward Kavanaugh and to a lesser extent newest conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett were anticipated. Some anti-abortion advocates and conservative movement figures had feared that Roberts would sway either Kavanaugh or Barrett from the draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that was an all-out rejection of Roe and women’s privacy rights.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has previously obtained inside information about conservative votes, had published an editorial on April 26 warning that Roberts, presumed to be working to save part of Roe, “may be trying to turn another Justice now.”

Roberts indeed was trying, according to CNN’s sources who also revealed that by the end of that April week the justices discovered that the news organization Politico had obtained Alito’s first draft of the Dobbs ruling from February.

Roberts and his colleagues spent a few anxious days quietly awaiting publication of the document, stretching through the afternoon of May 2, when all nine were together for a live-streamed memorial at the court for the late Justice John Paul Stevens. Politico first published its story about the draft that night at 8:32 p.m.

Roberts launched an investigation into who might be behind “this betrayal of the confidences of the Court.” He vowed that court’s work “will not be affected in any way.”

But, of course, it was, most notably in diminishing whatever chance he had to dislodge the five-justice bloc set to overturn Roe. The aggressive leak investigation worsened the existing strains among the justices, their law clerks and other employees in the nine chambers.

As CNN earlier reported, the court’s marshal, Gail Curley, asked law clerks who serve the justices for one-year terms to sign affidavits related to the leak and to turn over cell phone data. She also obtained electronic devices, CNN recently learned, from some permanent employees who work closely with the justices.

Friction among all intensified as protests began, fencing and barricades were erected around the court, and some usual end-of-session lunches and parties were dropped.

Aggravating everything and presenting the greatest consequence for all Americans was the emerging force of the court’s right-wing supermajority, which, aside from abortion rights, included Roberts.

The 6-3 court ruled boldly to enhance gun rights, favor religious conservatives, and diminish regulatory authority over the environment.

Roberts helped steer several of those rulings. For the court’s remaining three liberals, who held out some hope that the chief justice could moderate fellow conservatives on abortion rights, it was defeat all around.

Ginsburg’s death opened the door to justices reconsidering Roe

The Mississippi officials who transformed their initial defense of the state’s 15-week abortion ban into a broad assault on Roe benefited from two timely developments: the death of abortion rights supporter Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and a sudden Texas abortion controversy involving a ban at six-weeks of pregnancy.

Mississippi had lost in lower courts because its prohibition conflicted with Supreme Court precedent dating to Roe, reaffirmed in 1992, prohibiting states from interfering with a woman’s abortion decision before a fetus can live outside the womb, at about 23 weeks.

The Mississippi case reached the high court in summer 2020 and just as it was scheduled for a late September justices’ conference, Ginsburg died on September 18. Then-President Donald Trump immediately nominated Barrett, an abortion rights critic, and the Senate confirmed her on October 26.

Without Barrett, the Mississippi petition might have been denied, as had happened in the past with abortion ban cases. There could have been the requisite four votes to accept the case, to be sure, but there would not have been a definite fifth for a majority vote against Roe.

Based on their previous statements and records, Alito and Kavanaugh, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, disagreed with the high court’s past abortion-rights rulings. The fifth conservative (before Barrett’s succession of Ginsburg) was Roberts, and in 2020 he had broken from the right-wing to strike down a strict Louisiana regulation of physicians who perform abortions.

Roberts, as became evident, could not be counted on to reverse Roe.

Those calculations diminished in relevance with the addition of Barrett, of whom Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham declared during her confirmation hearing: “This is the first time in American history that we’ve nominated a woman who’s unashamedly pro-life and embraces her (Roman Catholic) faith without apology.”

Trump had promised during his 2016 presidential campaign to appoint justices who would reverse Roe. His third appointee, Barrett, however, wanted to hold off on an immediate vote on the pending Mississippi appeal, and the petition was repeatedly rescheduled for consideration through late 2020 and early 2021.

The justices publicly accepted Mississippi’s appeal on May 17, 2021, and stated that they would decide only one question – as Roberts continually remind his colleagues: “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”

Texas law S.B. 8 revealed conservatives’ mindset

Just two days later, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law – S.B. 8 – banning abortions at roughly six weeks of pregnancy. A challenge to that blatantly unconstitutional prohibition unexpectedly became a prelude to the Mississippi case and revealed the majority’s mindset.

The same five-justice majority that would eventually strike down Roe let the Texas ban take effect at the beginning of September, dissolving abortion rights for the country’s second most populous state.

Roberts, along with the three liberal justices, dissented then and in December after the court had heard oral arguments in the Texas case of Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson and ruled.

“The clear purpose and actual effect of S.B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings,” Roberts wrote, adding that “the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system” was at stake.

The chief justice’s persuasive power was also in the balance, and his failure to convince not one single colleague to break from the majority in the Texas controversy demonstrated a loss of authority in this area of the law.

By the time of December oral arguments in the Mississippi case, nationwide evisceration of abortion rights appeared near. Alito’s questions foreshadowed what he would write in the opinion. He suggested he would find Roe “egregiously wrong” and be disinclined toward any “half-measures,” that Roberts would propose. Kavanaugh and Barrett sounded similarly ready to go further than the question presented in the case originally tied to “pre-viability prohibitions” on abortion.

Roberts, on the other hand, wanted to dissolve the viability framework of Roe and the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He would vote to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortions at 15 weeks of pregnancy. But the chief justice believed the court should put off a full reconsideration of the constitutional right to abortion for earlier stages of pregnancy.

While no other justice revealed interest in that Roberts’ option at oral arguments or in the weeks that followed, sources told CNN that there was still an air of possibility behind the scenes, based on Roberts’ past pattern and the knowledge that justices have previously switched votes at the 11th hour.

Roberts, sources told CNN, might have some opening, even if slim.

In 2012, as the justices considered the first major challenge to the Affordable Care Act, Roberts himself changed his vote on two key parts of the case and engineered a compromise opinion that upheld the law known as Obamacare. Since then, Roberts has negotiated cross-ideological compromises, including in 2020 cases involving Trump’s efforts to keep his tax records and other business documents from investigators.

The May 2 disclosure of the first draft in Dobbs made an already difficult task nearly impossible. It shattered the usual secrecy of negotiations and likely locked in votes, if they were not already solid.

Alito draft leak seals the vote count

To the extent that liberals had hoped that the original vote by conservatives would change, that hope faded. Meanwhile, CNN has learned, Politico’s disclosure accelerated the urgency of the conservative side to try to issue the opinion before any other possible disruptions.

As Roberts kept trying to prevent total reversal of Roe, the three liberals worked on a joint dissent that recalled the three-justice plurality opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

They referred to the three justices who had 30 years earlier preserved Roe – Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, all appointees of Republican presidents – as “judges of wisdom.”

“They would not have won any contests for the kind of ideological purity some court watchers want Justices to deliver,” Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote. “But if there were awards for Justices who left this Court better than they found it? And who for that reason left this country better? And the rule of law stronger? Sign those Justices up.”

In the end, Roberts wrote alone. He concurred in the majority’s decision to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week ban but called its repudiation of Roe “a serious jolt to the legal system.”

With a rare note of personal uncertainty, Roberts added, “Both the Court’s opinion and the dissent display a relentless freedom from doubt on the legal issue that I cannot share.”