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James Comey went on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday and said the quiet part out loud.

The disgraced former FBI director, currently awaiting trial on a second federal indictment involving a social media post widely interpreted as a reference to the assassination of President Trump, told the viewing audience that he was urging the people he still considers his people inside the federal government to hang on, wait out the Trump administration, and then rebuild the institutions from the inside once the president is gone.

By Monday, the president had heard enough.

The response that followed was the most direct and unambiguous statement of intent toward the deep state that Donald Trump has ever publicly delivered.

“If they’re there, we’re gonna SEEK THEM OUT and get RID of them,” Trump declared, referring to embedded bureaucratic resisters operating inside the federal agencies.

“In every agency, YOU HAVE SCUM. They did at FBI, DOJ.”

He added:

“WE WILL PREVAIL. I’ve been standing here a long time with you, many years. They keep saying, I think that’s it. Yet, here I am.”

What prompted that response was Comey’s own words on national television.

“I’m urging them, hang on two and a half years, and then we can rebuild these institutions,” Comey said, speaking directly to the career prosecutors and agents he believes are still embedded in the Justice Department and FBI, waiting for Trump’s term to end.

It was an extraordinary statement from a man who has been indicted twice, who currently faces federal felony charges, and who was fired from the FBI directorship by the very president he is now publicly organizing resistance against.

What Comey delivered on Meet the Press was not commentary.

It was a strategy session conducted on national television, aimed at the people inside the government who are willing to act as his surrogates while he fights his legal battles from the outside.

Comey’s appearance on Meet the Press came as he faces a second federal indictment involving two felony counts centered on his 2025 Instagram post depicting seashells in the sand that read “86 47,” a widely understood reference to the assassination of the nation’s 47th president, Donald Trump.

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The man delivering a morale-boosting message to government resisters is not a neutral civic figure commenting on institutional health.

He is a twice-indicted former law enforcement official who posted what many interpreted as a call for the president’s assassination and who is now on television urging federal employees to defy the administration’s direction.

Comey made his defiant posture explicit on the program:

“If you’re bragging about forcing out career prosecutors and agents because the president doesn’t like a lawful investigation they conducted, something is seriously broken at the top.”

That framing is a deliberate inversion of the actual situation.

The Trump administration is not removing career prosecutors because it dislikes lawful investigations.

It is removing personnel who were identified as having participated in investigations that the administration has credibly argued were politically motivated, legally deficient, and conducted in violation of standard DOJ procedures.

The distinction matters, and Comey knows it matters, which is precisely why he frames the issue as he does.

Comey’s NBC appearance was not the only signal of organized resistance coming from the former intelligence community that week.

Former CIA Director John Brennan appeared on MSNBC and confirmed that there is a “legion” of operatives in the DOJ and CIA who are refusing to follow what he called politically motivated prosecutions.

Brennan said those individuals are refusing to support any type of political activities on the part of the Trump administration.

That description, delivered by the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is not a whistleblower account of government misconduct.

It is a public admission that organized institutional resistance to a duly elected president’s administration exists inside the American intelligence and law enforcement apparatus.

Brennan offered it without apparent concern for what it implied.

The combination of Comey’s public pep talk and Brennan’s open acknowledgment of a resistance “legion” gave the president a clear and documented basis for the response he delivered.

These were not anonymous sources claiming that some federal employees were dragging their feet on administration priorities.

These were named, prominent former intelligence officials publicly describing and encouraging a coordinated effort to obstruct the direction of the executive branch from within.

Trump’s vow to seek out and remove those individuals is not a threat of political persecution.

It is a statement of basic managerial authority over the executive branch that the Constitution vests in the president.

The history behind this confrontation stretches back to Trump’s first term, when the existence of institutionalized resistance to his administration first became publicly documented through leaked internal communications, anonymous op-eds in major newspapers, and the sustained campaign to use the FISA surveillance apparatus against his campaign and transition team.

The Russia collusion investigation, which produced no charges related to the central allegation and which the Durham report subsequently documented as having been opened on insufficient grounds, was the most visible manifestation of what the administration has always characterized as a politically motivated use of federal law enforcement power.

What is different in the second term is that the documentation of that resistance is no longer dependent on leaked information or whistleblower accounts.

Comey is doing it on NBC.

Brennan is doing it on MSNBC.

The former directors of the FBI and CIA are openly acknowledging the existence of an organized internal resistance to the Trump administration and urging it to continue.

That level of transparency about the nature of the deep state’s operations is historically unprecedented, and it has given the administration an evidentiary basis for its response that it did not have in the first term.

The legal situation surrounding Comey himself underscores the stakes of what he is doing.

His first federal indictment, involving allegations that he made false statements to Congress and obstructed a congressional proceeding connected to his testimony about FBI activities, was dismissed by a Clinton-appointed federal judge on what the administration characterized as a technicality involving the prosecuting attorney’s appointment status.

The second indictment, involving the “86 47” Instagram post, remains active.

Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to appeal the dismissal of the first case and confirmed the administration is exploring all available options to keep both matters alive.

FBI Director Kash Patel has been equally direct about the administration’s intentions toward those who believe they can outlast Trump.

His response to the first indictment’s dismissal was crisp and without self-pity:

“The judicial process can make whatever determination it wants, but we at the FBI and our partners at the DOJ have numerous options to proceed, and we’re executing on all those options.”

That is the statement of an agency leadership that views the accountability project as ongoing rather than concluded.

The court’s ruling dismissed a case on procedural grounds.

It did not exonerate anyone or extinguish the administration’s authority to pursue accountability through other legal channels.

For the millions of Americans who have watched the federal bureaucracy treat the Trump administration as an obstacle to be managed rather than a legitimate government to be served, the president’s vow to seek out and remove the embedded resisters represents a long-delayed and overdue assertion of democratic accountability.

The civil service is a legitimate institution with important functions.

It is not a permanent government with the authority to override the elected one.

The distinction between these two things has been blurred to the point of disappearance by the Comeys and Brennans of the intelligence community, who appear to believe that their professional judgment entitles them to nullify election outcomes they find objectionable.

The practical challenge of identifying and removing embedded resisters from within a federal workforce of over two million people is genuinely difficult.

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Career civil service protections, union agreements, and the sheer size of the bureaucratic apparatus create significant procedural obstacles to rapid personnel action.

The administration has made meaningful progress through Schedule F, which reclassified certain policy-relevant civil service positions to make them more easily replaceable, and through the DOGE efficiency initiative, which has reduced headcount in agencies identified as harboring institutional resistance.

But the process is slow, contested in courts, and politically costly in ways that the bureaucracy has learned to exploit.

What Trump’s public statement Monday accomplished was something different and perhaps more strategically valuable than any specific personnel action.

It told the people Comey was addressing in his NBC appearance that the administration knows they are there, that it intends to find them, and that believing they can simply wait out the clock on this presidency is a miscalculation they will come to regret.

The message was delivered at full volume, without diplomatic softening, and with the specific language that Comey’s own appearance had earned: scum.

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The January 6 investigation has taken another explosive turn, and this one implicates one of the most powerful and well-funded left-wing organizations in the country.

Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, revealed Thursday that congressional investigators are now probing whether the confidential human sources who infiltrated groups tied to January 6 were simultaneously receiving payments from the Southern Poverty Law Center, in addition to whatever compensation they were receiving from the Biden Justice Department.

The phrase Jordan used was pointed and deliberate: double dipping.

Jordan made his concern explicit:

“Were any of the guys they were paying, was the Biden Justice Department paying these same guys confidential human sources? We know 26 confidential human sources were at the Capitol on January 6th. Four went in the Capitol. They weren’t authorized to do so. I want to know if any of these guys were double dipping and taking money from the government and from the Southern Poverty Law Center. That’s one of the things we want to find out. That would be another new chapter if true and if proven.”

The allegation, if confirmed, would represent one of the most serious and convoluted intelligence scandals in recent American history.

A network of paid operatives simultaneously on the payroll of a nominally independent civil rights nonprofit and a federal law enforcement agency, deployed into political movements and present at the Capitol on the day of the January 6 breach, raises questions that go to the heart of who was actually directing those infiltrators, what their instructions were, and whether the events of that day were shaped in any way by their presence and activity.

The SPLC has its own significant legal problems that now form the backdrop for Jordan’s inquiry.

The Department of Justice announced an 11-count fraud indictment accusing the Southern Poverty Law Center of secretly funding leaders and organizers of white supremacist and racist hate groups while publicly claiming to fight those same organizations.

The indictment alleged that the SPLC’s paid informants, which the organization internally called “field sources,” engaged in the active promotion of racist groups at the same time the SPLC was denouncing those groups on its own website.

According to a DOJ press release, the SPLC between 2014 and 2023 allegedly secretly funneled more than $3 million in donations to individuals connected to extremist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of America.

The organization that spent decades presenting itself as the nation’s foremost authority on hate groups and the gold standard for tracking domestic extremism was, if the indictment is accurate, paying members of those same hate groups at the same time.

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The audacity of that arrangement, and the moral collapse it represents, is difficult to overstate.

The indictment describes in granular detail how one SPLC informant was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, attended the event at the direction of the SPLC, made racist postings under SPLC supervision, and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.

Charlottesville ended with a vehicle ramming counterprotesters, killing one person and injuring dozens more.

Whether any of the coordination that informant provided affected the outcome of that day is a question that has not yet been fully answered in open court.

Jordan’s specific question is whether any of the SPLC’s field sources overlap with the 26 FBI confidential human sources confirmed to have been at the Capitol on January 6.

That confirmation itself came only in December 2024, when the DOJ Office of Inspector General released a report revealing the number of FBI informants present that day.

Four of them entered the Capitol building without authorization.

The existence of those informants was not disclosed to the public, to defense attorneys representing January 6 defendants, or to congressional oversight committees in the years of investigation and prosecution that followed.

Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson have pressed the DOJ Inspector General for a full accounting of whether ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service, and Bureau of Prisons also had confidential human sources at the Capitol that day, beyond the 26 confirmed FBI sources.

The Inspector General’s response confirmed that those agencies had no tasked CHSs in Washington, D.C. on January 6 in connection with the events, but acknowledged it had no information about whether those agencies conducted a post-January 6 canvass to determine if any of their sources traveled to D.C. on their own initiative.

The absence of a canvass is itself a notable omission.

If your sources were in the area of a national crisis on the day it happened and you did not bother to check, the explanation is either incompetence or something else.

The overlap between the SPLC’s field source network and the federal government’s confidential human source apparatus is the thread that Jordan is now pulling, and it has the potential to unravel a significant amount of what the political establishment has presented as settled history about January 6.

The official narrative of that day has always relied on the idea that the people who entered the Capitol were an organic, self-directed mob of Trump supporters who independently decided to breach the building.

The existence of 26 FBI informants in that crowd, four of whom entered the Capitol, has always complicated that narrative.

The possibility that some of those individuals were also on the SPLC payroll complicates it considerably further.

The question of what the SPLC was doing with its field source network in the years leading up to January 6 is a legitimate national security and law enforcement inquiry in its own right.

An organization with the financial resources, political connections, and media credibility that the SPLC possessed was capable of deploying a sophisticated human intelligence operation that interacted with, infiltrated, and potentially helped shape the behavior of the very movements it was publicly denouncing.

If that operation overlapped with federal law enforcement informant programs, the implications for the integrity of the January 6 investigation are serious.

Jordan’s subpoena power as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee gives him real leverage to pursue this question.

The SPLC, now facing its own federal indictment, is not in a strong position to resist congressional demands for documentation of its field source payments and activities.

The question is whether the records exist in recoverable form, whether the former Biden DOJ officials who managed the confidential human source programs kept documentation of which individuals were being compensated, and whether anyone in the relevant bureaucracies will be forthcoming when asked to produce what they know.

For the hundreds of Americans who were prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned in connection with January 6, the revelation that paid government informants were present in significant numbers on that day, and that some of them entered the Capitol without authorization, raises profound questions about due process and the fairness of their prosecutions.

Criminal defendants are generally entitled to know whether government informants were present during the alleged criminal conduct.

The fact that the existence of 26 FBI sources was not disclosed for years, and that additional sources from other agencies may have been present as well, represents a disclosure failure with serious constitutional implications.

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The SPLC’s transformation from its founding purpose as a legitimate civil rights organization into what the federal indictment describes as a fraud scheme that secretly funded the hate groups it publicly condemned is a story that has been building for years.

Former employees have spoken publicly about an organization that became more interested in fundraising off the threat of extremism than in actually combating it.

The indictment, if proven at trial, would confirm that the cynical version of that criticism was an understatement.

The Biden Justice Department’s relationship with the SPLC during the years in question adds a political dimension that is impossible to ignore.

The Biden administration’s DOJ regularly cited SPLC research and designations in its domestic extremism assessments.

The possibility that the SPLC’s field sources, some of whom were apparently actively promoting extremist groups while being paid to monitor them, were also serving as federal confidential human sources during that same period represents a potential conflict of interest of the most serious kind.

Jordan has made clear he intends to pursue this investigation wherever it leads.

The House Judiciary Committee has the tools, the authority, and, based on Thursday’s announcement, the specific investigative theory needed to do so.

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President Trump confirmed this week what the diplomatic community had already begun to suspect and what the Cuban communist government had every reason to fear: the United States has a significant covert presence on the island, and the CIA is in Havana with a direct message from the commander in chief.

The president’s words were brief, unambiguous, and delivered with the casual confidence of a man who has already decided how this ends.

“We have a lot of people in Cuba,” Trump said.

“We have the CIA there.”

Trump’s public confirmation of CIA and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s presence on Cuban soil came alongside a declaration that has electrified the Cuban exile community and alarmed Havana:

“We’re freeing up Cuba.”

He added that to a lot of people, what is happening with Cuba is going to be one of the most important moments they have seen, and that people have been looking for this moment for 65 years.

Sixty-five years of communist misery, 65 years of political prisoners and firing squads and chronic poverty in a country 90 miles from the American coast, and the administration that has made regime change a stated national objective has now placed its top intelligence official on Cuban soil to deliver the message in person.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Cuba on May 14 and bluntly warned officials there against engaging in hostilities.

He also urged them to scrap their totalitarian government to end crippling U.S. sanctions.

A CIA official described the message plainly:

“Director Ratcliffe made clear that Cuba can no longer serve as a platform for adversaries to advance hostile agendas in our hemisphere.”

That is not the careful diplomatic language of a State Department that wants to preserve relationship options.

It is the language of an administration that has made a strategic decision and is delivering the terms.

The Air Force Boeing C-40B Clipper jet carrying Ratcliffe and his delegation touched down at Jose Marti International Airport in Havana on May 14, the “United States of America” emblazoned on its fuselage.

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Ratcliffe and his team sat down with the leadership of Cuba’s intelligence community, as well as Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the grandson of Raul Castro, who has been conducting back-channel talks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s office since February.

The presence of a Castro grandson at the table is a detail that deserves attention.

It suggests that even within the regime’s inner circle, there are individuals who understand that the political situation is deteriorating to the point where some form of accommodation with the United States may be necessary for the regime’s survival.

The Trump administration sees Cuba as a threat because of developments in drone warfare and the presence of Iranian military advisers in Havana.

A senior U.S. official explained the concern:

“When we think about those types of technologies being that close, and a range of bad actors from terror groups to drug cartels to Iranians to the Russians, it’s concerning.”

Cuba at this moment is not merely an ideological adversary.

It is a staging ground for Iranian advisers, a facility for Russian and Chinese signals intelligence collection, a training ground for soldiers deployed to fight in Ukraine on behalf of Putin’s war machine, and a geographic point 90 miles from the American mainland from which advanced drone technology could be deployed against the continental United States.

Russia has paid Cuba’s government an estimated $25,000 for each Cuban soldier deployed in Ukraine.

U.S. officials have noted that those soldiers are learning about Iranian tactics in the field.

“They’re part of the Putin meat grinder. They’re learning about Iranian tactics. It’s something we have to plan for,” a senior U.S. official said.

Cuba is not a neutral poor country living under American embargo.

It is an active participant in the Russian war effort against Ukraine, a training ground for the exchange of Iranian and Russian military doctrine, and a willing platform for adversary intelligence operations directed at the United States.

The Trump administration’s decision to treat it as a national security threat rather than a humanitarian case is a realistic assessment of what Cuba actually is.

The economic context of the Ratcliffe visit is as important as the strategic one.

On May 1, Trump signed a new executive order broadening restrictions on commercial interactions with Cuban entities and applying secondary sanctions to foreign businesses that engage with blocked Cuban agencies and officials.

On May 7, Secretary Rubio designated the Cuban military corporation GAESA, which administers much of the Cuban economy, as a blocked entity.

The new secondary sanctions immediately forced the Canadian mining giant Sherritt International to announce that it would close its mining operations on the island and request the Cuban government buy out its stake for $277 million.

The economic pressure campaign is designed to remove the last sources of hard currency keeping the regime functional.

When those sources are eliminated, the regime’s ability to pay its security forces, maintain its surveillance apparatus, and sustain the basic patronage networks that hold the political system together collapses.

Former CIA operative and Center for Security Policy analyst J. Michael Waller has stated that the Cuban Communist Party is “doomed” and that Trump and Secretary Rubio are committed to seeing this through.

Waller proposed that the administration adopt a high-impact strategy:

“I believe that if we can take control of the regime, make it work for us, and then dismantle it piece by piece, it would be a fantastic step forward.”

That is the framework of an administration that is not looking for a negotiated accommodation with the Castro dynasty but a managed dismantlement of the communist state from within.

Whether that ambitious goal is achievable in the timeframe the administration envisions is debated among Cuba analysts, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.

The economic indicators on the island confirm that the regime is closer to collapse than at any point since the Soviet subsidy ended in 1991.

Cuba’s GDP declined by more than 4 percent in 2025.

Sugar production fell to 150,000 tons, a historic low for a country that was once one of the world’s largest sugar exporters.

Fuel reserves recently hit zero, triggering massive blackouts that have left Havana and other major cities without power for extended periods and driven street protests of a scale the regime has not seen in years.

Raul Castro has postponed the party congress that was scheduled for April 2026, acknowledging what the party itself has described as an existential crisis.

The indictment of Raul Castro and five regime co-defendants, unsealed by the Trump Justice Department, charges them with the 1996 shoot-down of Brothers to the Rescue aircraft, in which four American citizens were killed.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the prosecution with the kind of moral clarity that the Cuban exile community has waited decades to hear:

“For the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in the United States for alleged acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens. President Trump and this Justice Department are committed to restoring a simple principle: if you kill Americans, we will pursue you. No matter who you are. No matter what title you hold.”

Charging a sitting foreign communist leader with the murder of American citizens while simultaneously deploying the CIA director to that leader’s capital is a level of geopolitical aggression that previous administrations were unwilling to contemplate.

The back-channel diplomacy that Rubio’s office has been conducting with Raul Castro’s grandson since February suggests that the administration is leaving a door open for some form of negotiated transition.

Trump himself said plainly of the Cuban regime:

“They will make a deal, or we will do it anyway.”

The “or we will do it anyway” portion of that statement is not a rhetorical flourish.

It is the organizing principle of the entire Cuba policy, backed by CIA operatives on the island, secondary sanctions dismantling the regime’s economic base, federal indictments against its leadership, and a military drone threat assessment that treats Cuban territory as a potential adversary staging area.

The Cuban exile community in the United States, which for 65 years has been told by successive American administrations that liberation was coming and then watched it not come, has greeted the Trump administration’s posture toward Havana with a mixture of cautious hope and hard-won skepticism.

The Kennedy administration launched the Bay of Pigs.

The Carter administration normalized relations.

The Obama administration sent Air Force One to Havana and shook Raul Castro’s hand.

The exile community has seen American presidents cycle through different approaches and Cuba has remained communist throughout.

What is different now, they argue, is the combination of economic desperation on the island, the administration’s willingness to use every instrument of national power, and the presence of American intelligence on Cuban soil with an explicit message about what the alternative to change looks like.

Whether Ratcliffe’s visit and Trump’s confirmation of CIA presence on the island represent the opening moves of a genuinely historic transformation or another chapter in the long history of American pressure that falls short of its objective is a question that only time will answer.

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The regime has proven extraordinarily resilient across six decades and more than a dozen American presidents.

It has survived the Bay of Pigs, the embargo, the collapse of Soviet subsidies, the brief Obama thaw and its reversal, and successive waves of internal dissent that it crushed with the tools of a totalitarian police state.

What it has not previously faced is an American president willing to confirm publicly that the CIA is on its soil, a former CIA operative calling its collapse imminent, a CIA director delivering ultimatums in its capital, secondary sanctions targeting its last remaining hard currency sources, federal criminal indictments against its leadership, and an explicit administration statement that regime change is a U.S. national objective to be achieved by the end of the year.

That combination is qualitatively different from anything that has come before, and the regime’s own postponed party congress, with its acknowledgment of an existential crisis, suggests the people running Cuba know it.

The Cuban people, who have been waiting 65 years for the moment Trump says is coming, deserve better than another American political cycle that talks about liberation and delivers something short of it.

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He thought he was untouchable. For years, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky had styled himself as Washington’s resident contrarian, a man who wore his obstruction like a badge of honor, voting against Republican priorities as readily as Democratic ones and daring anyone to do something about it. For a time, no one could. Tuesday night, someone finally did.

On Tuesday night, Massie lost his Republican primary to Ed Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL backed by President Donald Trump, in what has been described as the most expensive U.S. House primary race in American history, with over $32 million in advertising spent in a single congressional district. The loss ends Massie’s eight-term congressional career and delivers a resounding verdict from the voters of Kentucky’s 4th: when the country needs results, chronic obstruction is not a platform.

Thomas Massie was first elected to represent Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District in 2012, quickly building a reputation as one of Washington’s most reliably difficult members. A trained engineer who holds degrees from MIT and operates a farm in rural Kentucky, Massie cultivated an image as a pure constitutional conservative answering to no one.

In practice, that meant voting against measure after measure, regardless of whether it helped or hurt the agenda his own constituents sent him to advance. He became one of the few members of Congress equally despised by both parties, a distinction he appeared to wear proudly. His colleagues, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, openly admitted they could not understand his motivations or how his mind worked.

His collision course with Trump was entirely of his own making. In Trump’s second term, as the president moved aggressively to deliver on his mandate, Massie positioned himself as a one-man roadblock at nearly every turn. He publicly opposed the administration’s military posture against Iran at a moment when American strength demanded unified support.

He championed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a legislative grenade that generated significant disruption within the broader Republican coalition. Most consequentially, he refused to support Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation, the centerpiece of the president’s domestic agenda, hiding behind national debt concerns while offering no constructive alternative. He also broke with the White House on military aid to Israel and voted against resolutions denouncing antisemitism, positions so far outside the mainstream of his own party that pro-Israel donors, including AIPAC, entered the race specifically to remove him.

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Trump had seen enough. He announced his intention to defeat Massie last June and his political team immediately launched a PAC devoted solely to that mission. When Trump visited Kentucky personally to campaign for Gallrein, his assessment of the situation was direct and unvarnished.

“This is the guy I’m looking for. I wanted, just give me somebody with a warm body to beat Massie. And I got somebody with a warm body but a big, beautiful brain,” Trump said of Gallrein at the rally. He had previously called Massie the worst Republican member of Congress on Truth Social and predicted his defeat well in advance.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a stage with Gallrein in the closing days of the campaign. The White House made clear this was not merely a political preference but a statement of purpose: the Republican Party exists to govern, not to obstruct, and members who forget that answer to the voters who sent them.

Massie tried everything in the final stretch. He recruited allies including Rep. Lauren Boebert and attempted to frame his defiance as a principled stand. He argued that supporting him was not a vote against Trump. Voters were not persuaded.

In his concession speech, Massie predictably took jabs at his opponent and the president, mocking Gallrein’s whereabouts and warning darkly that legislative deference to the executive means tyranny. He teased a 2028 run, suggesting he has learned nothing from the verdict his own constituents just delivered.

Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House’s annual congressional picnic Tuesday evening, was characteristically direct: “He was a bad guy.

He deserves to lose.” The following morning, Trump told reporters he had a great number of victories across Tuesday’s primaries and that he won all races. When asked specifically about Massie, Trump said, “Not just Massie. Massie’s a low life,” and made clear that it does not work out well when Republican members vote against the agenda the American people elected him to deliver.

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White House communications director Steven Cheung posted a pointed message following the results: “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power.”

Gallrein opened his victory remarks with exactly the right words. “I want to thank President Trump for his support, his endorsement, and his counsel as I navigated this campaign, which is a journey unto itself,” he told supporters in Covington. A decorated Navy SEAL who spent his career in service to this country, Gallrein represents precisely the kind of results-oriented, mission-focused representation that Kentucky’s 4th District deserves.

The broader message of Tuesday night could not be clearer. Trump’s political grip on the Republican base is as strong as ever, and the voters who make up that base have demonstrated once again that they are not interested in performative independence from members who use constitutional language as cover for doing nothing.

They want an agenda delivered. They want America First to mean something. Massie had twelve years to prove he could be a constructive force in that effort. He chose obstruction instead, and Kentucky chose accordingly.

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For thirty years, four families buried their loved ones without justice. Three American citizens and a legal U.S. resident were shot out of the sky by a communist regime operating with the full confidence that the United States government would never hold them accountable. Administration after administration proved them right. Until now.

On Wednesday, the Trump Department of Justice unsealed a historic indictment charging former Cuban dictator Raul Castro, 94, with murder, conspiracy to kill American citizens, and destruction of aircraft in connection with the 1996 shootdown of two unarmed civilian planes over international waters in the Straits of Florida.

Five co-defendants, the Cuban MiG fighter pilots who carried out the attack, were charged alongside him. The announcement was made at Miami’s Freedom Tower, a monument to every Cuban who risked everything to escape the very regime now facing American justice.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stood before the crowd and delivered words that the Cuban exile community had waited three decades to hear. “For the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in the United States for alleged acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens. President Trump and this Justice Department are committed to restoring a simple principle: if you kill Americans, we will pursue you. No matter who you are. No matter what title you hold.”

FBI Director Kash Patel was equally direct. “For 30 years these families have waited for answers, and this FBI never forgot. We will continue working with our Justice Department partners to bring to justice those who attacked our civilians.”

The four men murdered that day were Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre Jr., Mario de la Pena, and Pablo Morales. They were members of Brothers to the Rescue, known in Spanish as Hermanos al Rescate, a Miami-based humanitarian organization that flew small unarmed Cessna aircraft over the Straits of Florida searching for Cuban rafters making the desperate crossing to freedom.

By their own count, they saved thousands of lives, spotting people adrift at sea and radioing their coordinates to the Coast Guard. They were humanitarians. They were Americans. And the Castro regime murdered them in cold blood over international waters.

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The backstory matters. In 1995 and early 1996, Brothers to the Rescue had flown protest missions over Cuba, dropping anti-Castro leaflets over Havana. The regime was furious. On the morning of February 24, 1996, two Brothers to the Rescue Cessna planes lifted off on what should have been a routine mission. Cuban Air Force MiG jets intercepted them over international waters and fired air-to-air missiles, obliterating both aircraft. No bodies were ever recovered. The families had no graves to visit.

The Castro regime never denied it. Fidel Castro said Cuba’s military had acted on standing orders. The International Civil Aviation Organization later concluded the shootdown took place over international waters, making it an act of state-sanctioned murder against unarmed civilians on a humanitarian mission.

What followed was thirty years of American weakness. The Clinton administration imposed sanctions but refused to pursue criminal charges against the Castro brothers, despite federal prosecutors in Miami having prepared a potential indictment.

Career officials at the State Department, the intelligence community, and other corners of the federal bureaucracy resisted aggressive action, prioritizing diplomatic maneuvering over American lives. In 2003, the two MiG pilots were indicted but never extradited. That was as far as any previous American government had been willing to go. The message to the Castro regime was unmistakable: kill Americans, and Washington will look the other way.

That era is over. The Trump administration has made clear, through both words and action, that American blood demands a reckoning regardless of how much time has passed or how powerful the perpetrator believes himself to be.

The indictment of Castro follows the dramatic January capture of then-Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, who was brought to the United States to face criminal drug trafficking and weapons charges after a U.S. military raid. Hostile regimes in the Western Hemisphere that spent decades operating with impunity are now learning a hard and overdue lesson.

A grand jury in Miami brought the indictment on April 23. The government chose to unseal it on Wednesday, Cuban Independence Day, the date marking the end of U.S. occupation of the island in 1902. The symbolism was deliberate and powerful.

Cuba’s communist regime responded as it always does. The foreign minister called the charges illegitimate. President Miguel Diaz-Canel dismissed them as a political act with no legal foundation. The Cuban prime minister labeled Brothers to the Rescue a narco-terrorist organization.

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These are the same lies the regime has recycled for sixty years to justify every atrocity it has committed. They deserve the same weight they have always deserved: none.

Castro, now 94, remains on the island. A warrant has been issued for his arrest. When Blanche was asked how far the government would go to bring him to the United States, his answer was simple. “We expect that he will show up here, by his own will or by another way.”

For Miriam de la Pena, the mother of Mario de la Pena, one of the four men murdered in the Straits of Florida three decades ago, Wednesday’s announcement carried the kind of weight that no press conference can fully capture. “The lives of these four innocent people are finally recognized,” she said. “It’s a big load off my back.”

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On Tuesday, Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Republican runoff for the United States Senate, dealing a devastating blow to incumbent Sen. John Cornyn one week before voting ends in a race that has become the most expensive Senate primary in American history. The endorsement, delivered in a lengthy post on Truth Social, immediately reshuffled what was already a bruising fight and sent shockwaves through the Senate Republican establishment, which had been quietly counting on Cornyn to hold the seat.

Trump’s words left nothing to interpretation. “Ken is a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate. He will tirelessly fight to continue the Great Growth of our Economy, Cut Taxes and Regulations,” Trump wrote. He added: “Ken Paxton has gone through a lot, in many cases, very unfairly, but he is a Fighter, and knows how to WIN. Our Country needs Fighters, and also Loyalty to the Cause of Greatness.”

On Cornyn, Trump was pointed but measured. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough and, despite having the Most Successful Economy in the History of our Country during my First Term and, with all of the many other things that I accomplished,” the president wrote, a clear reference to Cornyn’s hesitation to back Trump during critical moments in the 2024 presidential primary.

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The endorsement caps more than a year of frantic courtship from both camps. Cornyn spent the better part of eighteen months positioning himself as a reliable Trump ally, boasting that he had voted with the president more than 99 percent of the time in the Senate. After the endorsement dropped, Cornyn posted on X that he has worked closely with Trump through both of his presidential terms. “He has consistently called me a friend in this race,” Cornyn said, asking Texas Republicans to stand with him. But the damage was done. A sitting president had looked a five-term Senate incumbent in the eye and chosen the other guy.

Paxton, for his part, was effusive. “No one has ever fought harder for the American people than President Trump, and I look forward to championing his America First agenda in the Senate,” he posted after the endorsement landed.

To understand why this endorsement carries so much weight, one must understand what Ken Paxton represents in Texas conservative politics. As attorney general for over a decade, Paxton became one of the most combative and consequential legal warriors in the country on behalf of conservative causes. He led multistate lawsuits against the Biden administration’s open border policies, fought woke corporate agendas in court, and took on the federal government at nearly every turn when it overstepped its constitutional bounds. He was, in the truest sense, a fighter long before fighting was fashionable in Republican politics.

His path has not been without turbulence. Paxton was indicted in 2015 on securities fraud charges, a legal saga that dragged on for nine years through two reelection victories before ultimately being resolved in 2024 when he agreed to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution and complete community service in exchange for the charges being dropped. In 2023, the Texas House impeached him on a range of allegations, but the Texas Senate acquitted him on all counts. Paxton and his supporters have long maintained that the legal attacks against him were politically motivated efforts by establishment forces to take down one of the most effective conservative fighters in the country.

The timing of the endorsement is significant. It came the same day Trump’s endorsed candidate, Ed Gallrein, defeated Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky, giving the president back-to-back victories in a single news cycle that demonstrated his undiminished power over Republican primary voters.

It also came just days after Trump successfully pushed Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana out of his seat after years of fallout from Cassidy’s vote to convict Trump in the second impeachment. The message being sent to the Republican Party is consistent and unmistakable.

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The stakes in Texas extend beyond the primary. The Texas race has become the most expensive Senate primary in American history, with both parties having spent well over $100 million total, a figure that will continue to climb. Democrats, sensing an opportunity, nominated state Rep. James Talarico and are eyeing Texas as a potential pickup in November.

Senate Republican leaders had argued privately that Cornyn represented the safer general election candidate. Trump disagreed, and in Trump’s Republican Party, that is the only argument that matters.

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The Department of Justice filed a landmark lawsuit against the California Department of Education and the California Interscholastic Federation, the governing body for the state’s high school sports, for violating Title IX by forcing biological girls to compete against biological males in athletic competition.

The lawsuit alleges that California’s policies “eviscerate equal athletic opportunities for girls” and create “a hostile educational environment that denies girls educational opportunities.” The federal government is seeking a court order to block California’s policy immediately and has signaled it may withhold billions of dollars in federal education funding if the state refuses to comply.

The case is now being pursued under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who assumed the role after Trump replaced Pam Bondi in April 2026.

When the lawsuit was filed in July 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi was unsparing in her condemnation of California’s policy. “The Governor of California has previously admitted that it is deeply unfair to force women and girls to compete with men and boys in competitive sports,” she said.

“But not only is it deeply unfair, it is also illegal under federal law. This Department of Justice will continue its fight to protect equal opportunities for women and girls in sports.” She then turned to the rest of the country with a warning that every state defying common sense and federal law should hear plainly: “If you do not comply, you’re next. We will protect girls in girls sports.”

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The lawsuit has been years in the making, driven by a controversy that has played out in painful public view on California’s track and field circuit. For two consecutive years, a biological male student competing on the girls’ circuit has dominated female competitors in jumping events at the state championship level, winning the high jump, long jump, and triple jump while biological girls who trained their entire athletic careers for these moments were pushed off the podium they earned. The image of a female runner-up standing on the gold medal podium last year, where she technically should have finished first, went viral and became a defining symbol of what happens when activist ideology overrides basic fairness in competitive athletics.

California’s response to the mounting outrage was not to protect its girls. It was to create a patch. The California Interscholastic Federation quietly introduced a pilot policy allowing additional biological female athletes to qualify and receive duplicate medals in events where a transgender athlete competed. The girls displaced from first place were handed consolation hardware. The underlying policy remained untouched. As Sophia Lorey, a former NCAA soccer player and outreach director for Save Girls Sports, put it plainly: “If they have to create special exceptions and backdoor rule changes to placate frustrated athletes, that’s not equality, that’s a confession. Girls’ sports should be for girls, full stop.”

The lawsuit points directly to what is at stake beyond the medal stand. Girls across California, the federal government argues, are being displaced from podiums, denied awards, and missing out on critical visibility for college scholarships and recognition they rightfully earned through years of training and sacrifice. They are also, the lawsuit notes, required to share intimate spaces such as locker rooms with biological males, an invasion of privacy that no girl or her parents should be forced to accept.

California’s law permitting biological males to compete in girls’ sports based on gender identity has been on the books since 2013, making it one of the most entrenched and aggressive such policies in the country. Governor Gavin Newsom has presided over it without apology. His office’s response to the federal lawsuit was to accuse the Trump administration of cynical distraction tactics. This from a governor who once admitted publicly that forcing girls to compete against biological males is, in his own words, deeply unfair, and then did precisely nothing to stop it.

The numbers make the politics of this issue clear. A recent poll found that roughly seven in ten American adults believe transgender female athletes should not be allowed to compete in girls’ and women’s sports at the high school, college, or professional level. That view is shared by approximately nine in ten Republicans and even roughly half of Democrats. The radical gender ideology being enforced in California’s public schools is not a mainstream position. It is an activist agenda being imposed on girls and their families by a government that long ago stopped listening to them.

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President Trump signed an executive order in February 2025 aimed at barring biological males from competing on female sports teams at any institution receiving federal funding. California’s educational establishment responded by announcing it would follow state law rather than the president’s order. That defiance is now being answered in federal court.

The lawsuit is more than a legal filing. It is a declaration that the federal government under Donald Trump will stand between girls and the ideological agenda that has spent years systematically dismantling the protections Title IX was designed to guarantee them. Title IX was passed in 1972 to ensure that biological females had equal opportunities in education and athletics. Using that same law to now force girls to lose to biological males is a perversion of everything it was meant to protect.

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The United States Congress has formally expanded its investigation into unidentified anomalous phenomena beyond the Pentagon and into the private sector, with Republican lawmakers now sending congressional letters to defense contractors and federally funded research institutions that whistleblowers and former intelligence officials allege have been used as deliberate vehicles to hide classified UAP programs from elected oversight. The investigation is no longer a peripheral curiosity in Washington.

It is an active, escalating confrontation between Congress and a network of private organizations that may have been handed some of the most extraordinary secrets in American history specifically because doing so put those secrets beyond the reach of the people’s representatives.

At the center of the expanded investigation is Representative Eric Burlison, Republican of Missouri, who has named RAND Corporation, MITRE, the Aerospace Corporation, MIT Lincoln Labs, and the Northrop Grummans of the world as targets of his inquiry.

The list reads like a directory of the most powerful and secretive institutions in the American defense industrial complex, organizations that have operated for decades at the intersection of classified government work and private enterprise, shielded from the Freedom of Information Act by their hybrid legal status and from congressional scrutiny by the very compartmentalization that was supposedly designed for national security.

Burlison stated his investigative theory plainly: “If you really want to hide something from Congress, you don’t put it in a government file cabinet. You hand it to a private contractor.” That observation is not conspiratorial speculation.

It is a description of a structural reality that has governed classified government contracting for decades, and it is the organizing principle of the congressional investigation that is now accelerating across multiple House committees.

The investigation gained considerable momentum when Burlison revealed that he had sent a formal congressional letter to MIT Lincoln Laboratory requesting access to a classified 1952 briefing video described in historical records as a “flying saucer talk.” The institution’s attorneys responded quickly and indicated they would comply within 30 days.

The speed of that response is itself a signal. Congressional letters carry weight that FOIA requests do not, and the fact that a 74-year-old classified briefing video exists at a defense research institution and is being handed over to Congress under congressional pressure raises obvious questions about what else has been sitting in similar archives, unexamined, for generations.

Burlison also revealed that the White House contacted him following the release of a tranche of Pentagon UAP files in May 2026, with officials asking him to publicly support the release of the videos. He said administration officials admitted they were uncertain where to take the investigation next and asked him for guidance on who they should interview regarding classified UAP programs.

That admission from White House officials that they do not fully know the landscape of what exists or who holds it is perhaps the most extraordinary detail yet to emerge from the congressional investigation, and it suggests that the information architecture around UAP programs is sufficiently compartmentalized that even the executive branch cannot see the full picture.

The strategy reflects allegations previously raised by former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch during congressional testimony in 2023, when Grusch claimed the federal government and defense contractors had operated secret crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs involving unidentified aerial phenomena while shielding the projects from congressional scrutiny through private sector compartmentalization. Grusch’s testimony was treated with skepticism in some quarters when it was first delivered.

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The expansion of a formal House investigation into precisely the contractors he named suggests that the congressional committees that heard his testimony found more corroboration than they disclosed at the time.

Investigative reporter George Knapp, who has covered the UAP issue for decades and testified before the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets in September 2025, named Lockheed Martin as one of the defense contractors holding retrieved materials and stated plainly that private contractors serve as gatekeepers, shielding information from public oversight and even from elected officials. Knapp’s testimony was delivered under oath before a congressional committee. He is not an anonymous blogger or a fringe commentator.

He is a veteran investigative journalist who built his career on primary sources and government documents, and what he described before Congress is a system in which private companies have been entrusted with information that the elected government of the United States cannot access.

Knapp described how aerospace contractor Robert Bigelow negotiated with Lockheed Martin to acquire unusual materials stored in California facilities, materials that were described as “not made here.”

The phrase “not made here” is not a throwaway line. It is a direct claim that materials of unknown origin, recovered at some point from an unspecified location, have been stored in private contractor facilities in California and traded between defense aerospace companies, outside of any known congressional oversight or public accounting.

Retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, testifying before the House Oversight Committee, made the constitutional dimension of the congressional access problem explicit: “There is a national security need for more UAP transparency. In 2025, the U.S. will spend over $900 billion on national defense, yet we still have an incomplete understanding of what is in our airspace. The failure of the Executive Branch to share UAP information with Congress is an infringement on the legislative branch that undermines separation of powers and may be creating a constitutional crisis.”

A retired four-star flag officer describing the UAP information situation as a potential constitutional crisis is not hyperbole deployed for effect. It is a legal and institutional judgment from a man who spent decades inside the national security apparatus and understands precisely what the separation of powers means and when it is being violated.

Journalist and researcher Michael Shellenberger, testifying before the same committee, reinforced the constitutional concern: “There is a growing body of evidence that the government is not being transparent about what it knows about unidentified anomalous phenomena, and that elements within the military and intelligence community are in violation of their constitutional duty to notify Congress of their operations.” Congressional notification of operations is not optional.

It is a legal requirement rooted in the Constitution’s grant of appropriations authority to the legislature. Programs that exist without congressional knowledge are programs funded with taxpayer money that the taxpayers’ representatives have been denied the ability to oversee. Whatever those programs contain, that structural violation alone demands accountability.

The federally funded research and development centers at the heart of Burlison’s investigation occupy a particularly complex legal position in the American government structure. MIT Lincoln Laboratory, MITRE, the RAND Corporation, the Aerospace Corporation, and similar institutions were established in the 1940s and 1950s to preserve the scientific and technical expertise the government mobilized during World War II, but to do so outside the civil service in organizations that could operate with greater flexibility and less public accountability.

That structure has served legitimate national security purposes for decades. It has also, according to mounting testimony before Congress, created legal architecture that can be and allegedly has been used to place sensitive programs one step beyond the reach of the oversight that the Constitution assigns to the legislative branch.

Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of the most persistent congressional voices on UAP disclosure, has accused defense agencies of siloing information to avoid congressional questions and compared the alleged practices to the classified structure used during the Manhattan Project in World War II. The Manhattan Project comparison is instructive rather than inflammatory.

The atomic bomb program was successfully hidden from most of Congress and the public for years precisely because it was compartmentalized across multiple private contractors, universities, and government installations in ways that prevented any single person or institution from seeing the whole picture. The question being raised on Capitol Hill today is whether a similar architecture has been maintained around UAP programs for seven decades, and whether the people funding it through their tax dollars have any right to know what it contains.

On May 8, 2026, the Trump administration released its first tranche of interagency declassified UAP files through the newly established Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System, known as PURSUE, via the war.gov/ufo portal. The initial release contained more than 160 files, with at least 100 of those including redactions, and included official reports by military pilots and other U.S. personnel describing metallic spheres, flying discs, and glowing orbs.

The release was described by UAP disclosure advocates as a meaningful first step and an inadequate partial measure simultaneously, which is precisely what partial releases of heavily redacted files tend to produce.

Six officials deeply involved in the disclosure effort told reporters that the initial tranche represented data alone and not disclosure, meaning that raw files without context, without the analytical judgments of the people who investigated the cases, and without access to the physical evidence and program histories that whistleblowers say exist in contractor facilities do not constitute genuine transparency.

The distinction between releasing documents and actually disclosing what the government knows is critical and consistently blurred in official communications about UAP. Releasing 160 files while thousands more remain classified, and while the physical evidence that whistleblowers describe sits in private contractor vaults untouched, is not disclosure. It is managed revelation.

During a briefing with the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, Burlison said lawmakers reviewed around 30 UAP videos that he described as incredible, including one showing an object flying at high speed that then instantaneously accelerated to what looked like Mach speed. An object that accelerates instantaneously to hypersonic velocity does not belong to any known flight physics framework. No human aerospace program, acknowledged or classified, produces that behavior.

The engineers and physicists who design the most advanced aircraft and propulsion systems in the world do not have access to propulsion that works this way. The videos being shown to Congress in classified briefings apparently document it happening.

A March 31, 2026 House letter to the Pentagon requesting specific UAP video releases included cases ranging from civil airspace incidents near Columbus, Ohio, to combat theater encounters tied to Iran and Syria, a military intercept over Lake Huron involving an Air National Guard F-16 and an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile; and a transmedium case described as multiple spherical UAPs and unidentified submerged objects near a submarine. The breadth of that list is itself revelatory. Congress is not chasing a single category of unexplained event.

It is pursuing a pattern of encounters spanning civilian airspace, active combat theaters, domestic military training ranges, and the ocean environment near American submarines, suggesting that whatever is being observed is not confined to one domain or one set of circumstances.

The whistleblower protection dimension of the congressional investigation has become increasingly urgent as the probe expands. Lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets have expressed mounting frustration that potential witnesses with knowledge of contractor-held programs are afraid to come forward despite legal protections that already exist on paper.

The fear is not irrational. Witnesses who testified before Congress in September 2025 described an environment in which people who spoke out faced professional retaliation and illegal surveillance of their communications, and in at least one case were warned that speaking the wrong words could expose them to espionage charges carrying the death penalty.

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The September 2025 hearing of the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force produced testimony that should have generated sustained national news coverage and largely did not. Witnesses described a classification apparatus that had been deliberately weaponized not to protect national security but to protect the programs themselves from the scrutiny that national security oversight is supposed to provide. The argument that classification exists to prevent adversaries from learning what America knows is legitimate when the information being protected is genuine operational intelligence.

The argument dissolves when the classification is being used to prevent the United States Congress from learning what American contractors are doing with American taxpayer money inside American facilities.

The constitutional question that Gallaudet raised before the committee deserves to be the frame through which this entire investigation is understood. The American government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. The governed express that consent through their elected representatives. The elected representatives fund the government through appropriations. Programs that exist outside that appropriations chain, funded through mechanisms that conceal their nature and purpose from the legislature, are programs that operate without the consent of the governed.

Whether those programs contain retrieved materials of unknown origin, reverse engineered technology, biological specimens, or simply decades of classified aerospace research that was never returned to the public record, the fundamental democratic problem is the same: the people’s representatives do not know what is being done in the people’s name with the people’s money.

The investigation that Burlison and his colleagues are now pursuing into RAND, MITRE, Aerospace Corporation, MIT Lincoln Labs, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin is not a fringe exercise by conspiracy-minded lawmakers. It is an exercise of the most basic constitutional authority the legislature possesses: the authority to know where the money goes and what it buys.

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A 64-year-old Marina del Rey woman has agreed to plead guilty to a federal felony charge after investigators say she paid homeless people on Los Angeles’ Skid Row cash to register to vote, in some cases allowing them to use her own home address on their registration forms, potentially routing mail-in ballots directly to her residence.

Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, known on the streets of Skid Row simply as “Anika,” is charged with one felony count of paying another person to register to vote, a federal offense carrying a statutory maximum sentence of five years in federal prison.

She appeared in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana on Monday, May 18, 2026, and is expected to formally enter her guilty plea in the coming weeks. The case was investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.

The mechanics of Armstrong’s scheme are straightforward and, precisely because of their simplicity, deeply troubling. As a paid petition circulator, Armstrong was compensated by coordinators based on the number of signatures she collected.

The more names on the page, the more money she made. Starting no later than 2025, prosecutors say, she began maximizing her earnings by offering homeless people on Skid Row cash payments not only to sign her petitions but also to fill out voter registration forms.

She came prepared. Before heading to Skid Row, Armstrong would pick up a stack of blank voter registration forms from the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters and bring them with her into one of the most impoverished and vulnerable communities in the state.

The payments she offered were almost insultingly small. Prosecutors say Armstrong regularly paid between two and three dollars per signature and registration, though the inducements sometimes also included cigarettes and phone charging cords. Two dollars.

That is what it cost Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong to potentially corrupt a voter registration and introduce a fraudulent ballot into the California election system. Two dollars, a cigarette, or a charging cord, offered to people with nowhere to sleep and no leverage to refuse, in exchange for putting their name on a form they may not have understood and could not verify.

The address problem at the center of this case is where the fraud metastasizes from bad to potentially catastrophic. Many of the homeless individuals Armstrong approached on Skid Row did not have a residential address to list on their voter registration forms.

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Armstrong’s solution was to allow them, on multiple occasions, to use her own former residence as their registered address. Under California’s vote-by-mail system, which automatically sends a ballot to every registered voter, this arrangement created the direct possibility that mail-in ballots issued in the names of homeless individuals who had no connection to that address could arrive at Armstrong’s home.

What she did with those ballots, if any arrived, is a question the investigation has thus far left publicly unanswered, but the potential for those votes to be cast without the knowledge or consent of the people in whose names they were issued is not theoretical. It is the logical consequence of the system Armstrong constructed.

The specific incident at the heart of the federal charge occurred on January 30, 2026, when Armstrong knowingly and willfully paid another person to register to vote in a federal election.

That act, captured and documented by investigators, forms the core of the one-count felony to which she has agreed to plead guilty. Beyond the maximum five-year prison term, Armstrong faces three years of probation, a fine of up to $10,000, and a mandatory special assessment fee.

Armstrong’s hunting ground of choice was Skid Row, and that choice was not accidental.

Skid Row, a roughly 50-block area of downtown Los Angeles that is home to one of the largest concentrations of homeless individuals in the United States, offered Armstrong exactly what a person running her kind of scheme would want: high population density, a community of people willing to provide signatures in exchange for small amounts of cash, and an environment where few questions would be asked and fewer still would be answered. It was, in prosecutors’ framing, a convenient place because of its high concentration of people willing to sign petitions in exchange for payment, concentrated in a relatively small area.

The undercover dimension of this case adds a layer of accountability that the mainstream media has largely tried to minimize. Conservative investigative journalist James O’Keefe and his organization captured footage of a woman handing cash to homeless individuals in exchange for voter registration activity, footage that was posted by Real America’s Voice in mid-May 2026.

The federal charges announced days later confirmed that what O’Keefe’s cameras recorded was not manufactured or misleading. It was documentation of an actual federal crime being committed in broad daylight on the streets of Los Angeles. The people who spent years dismissing O’Keefe’s work as sensationalism now have a federal plea agreement to contend with.

The Justice Department’s response to the case has been appropriately direct. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division stated: “False registrations undermine Americans’ faith in elections, even more so when payoffs are involved.

This Justice Department is committed to ensuring that all U.S. elections are fair and free from illegal meddling, so that all Americans can accept the results with confidence.” That statement reflects exactly the right framing of what is at stake. This is not merely a technical violation of election law by a single opportunistic woman on the margins of the political process.

It is a direct attack on the confidence that ordinary Americans place in the legitimacy of their elections.

The FBI and investigators from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California led the investigation, a fact that matters in the current environment.

Federal resources were committed to this case. Career law enforcement professionals spent time and effort building it. The result is a guilty plea that vindicates those resources and sends a clear message to anyone else operating similar schemes in California or elsewhere that the federal government is watching and is willing to prosecute.

The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, Dean C. Logan, released a statement condemning Armstrong’s actions: “These charges and the admission of guilt represent egregious offenses that both undermine access to voter registration and elections and that exploit those who are unhoused in our community.” That second point is worth dwelling on.

The victims of Armstrong’s scheme were not abstractions. They were human beings living in desperate circumstances, people without stable housing, reliable income, or consistent access to the basic civic information that would allow them to understand what they were signing and what consequences might follow. Armstrong did not merely break election law.

She exploited the most vulnerable people in one of America’s wealthiest cities for a few extra dollars per day.

The fact that Armstrong worked in this industry for approximately two decades before federal authorities moved against her raises questions that go beyond the individual case.

The petition circulating is a paid profession in California, one that operates at the intersection of direct democracy and commerce in ways that have always invited manipulation. Circulators are paid per signature, a compensation model that creates obvious incentives to prioritize volume over verification.

Armstrong allegedly recognized and exploited that incentive structure in ways that crossed from aggressive to criminal, but the structural conditions that made her scheme possible, the per-signature pay model, the availability of blank registration forms, and the ease of registering with an address the registrar cannot immediately verify, did not disappear when she was arrested.

California’s automatic vote-by-mail system, which sends a ballot to every registered voter regardless of whether that voter requested one, is directly implicated in this case in ways that deserve serious examination.

The state’s vote-by-mail infrastructure was designed with the stated goal of expanding access. What the Armstrong case illustrates is that the same features that make the system accessible also make it exploitable. A registration tied to a false address, or to a vulnerable person who was paid two dollars to fill out a form they may not have understood, generates a ballot that goes somewhere.

The question of where those ballots went and what happened to them is one the state of California owes its voters a complete answer to.

For the millions of Californians who cast their votes legally, who registered themselves, provided their own addresses, and made their own decisions about how to vote, the Armstrong case is an insult.

Every fraudulent registration in the system, whether or not it ultimately produces a fraudulent vote, degrades the integrity of the rolls, burdens election administrators trying to maintain accurate records, and provides legitimate grounds for the kind of public skepticism about election outcomes that everyone on both sides of the political aisle claims to want to prevent.

The people who insist most loudly that election integrity concerns are unfounded are the same people who are most resistant to the kind of prosecutorial attention to cases like Armstrong’s that would actually address those concerns.

The geography of the scheme is also worth noting. Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong lives in Marina del Rey, one of the most affluent coastal communities in Los Angeles County. She operated her scheme on Skid Row, among the city’s most destitute residents.

The class dimension of what she allegedly did, an upscale professional using impoverished homeless people as raw material for a fraud scheme that personally benefited her financially, is not something that the press has been eager to examine closely, but it is unmistakably present in the facts of the case.

California has long maintained that its election systems are among the most secure and accessible in the nation, and state officials have been among the most vocal critics of any suggestion that the system requires additional safeguards or oversight.

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The Armstrong case does not prove that California’s elections are broadly compromised. It proves that a single operator working a single corner of a single city was able to run a voter registration fraud scheme for an extended period before federal investigators caught her. The natural question that follows is how many other Armstrongs are working in other corners of other cities and whether California’s election oversight apparatus, which clearly did not catch this scheme on its own, is adequately equipped to find them.

The political context surrounding election integrity in California adds significance to the timing of this prosecution.

The Trump administration’s Justice Department, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, has made the prosecution of election fraud a stated priority in a way that the Biden administration demonstrably did not. The Armstrong case is among the clearest examples of what that prioritization looks like in practice: federal resources directed at a real fraud scheme, a real criminal charge, a real plea agreement, and a real felony conviction in the making.

The argument that election fraud does not warrant this kind of federal attention is harder to make from inside a Santa Ana courtroom where the defendant has agreed to plead guilty to exactly that.

Armstrong is scheduled to make her formal guilty plea in the coming weeks. When she does, she will become a convicted federal felon, and her case will join the public record as documented, prosecuted, adjudicated election fraud carried out on the streets of one of the most heavily Democratic jurisdictions in the United States.

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Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur who spent years calling Donald Trump the most unethical person he had ever done business with, who stumped for Kamala Harris on the 2024 campaign trail, and who took every available opportunity to position himself as the respectable face of anti-Trump business culture, stood Monday at the White House podium, grinning beside the president he once despised, and announced himself as one of the biggest proponents of TrumpRx in the country. The president, for his part, could not resist the moment.

A reporter at the White House event noted the awkward history directly, pointing out to Trump that “Mark endorsed Kamala Harris back in 2024.” Trump’s response was immediate, cheerful, and utterly without mercy: “Well, he made a mistake. It was a big mistake.” Cuban, standing just behind the president, laughed. The room laughed. And somewhere in that brief exchange, the entire political theater of the 2024 election cycle was punctured with a single line that the president delivered with the ease of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

Cuban appeared happy to promote TrumpRx from the podium, telling the assembled crowd: “I think other than you, I’ve been the biggest proponent of TrumpRx.com.” He framed the initiative as a rare point of genuine national agreement: “Republicans want cheaper drugs, independents want cheaper drugs, Democrats want cheaper drugs. And together I think we’re going to do something special.”

It was a straightforward, bipartisan pitch for a policy that has no natural enemies among ordinary Americans, which is exactly the kind of political terrain that the Trump administration has been methodically claiming since returning to office.

The White House event marked a significant expansion of the TrumpRx initiative, with the administration announcing the addition of more than 600 generic drugs through partnerships with GoodRx, Amazon Pharmacy, and Cost Plus Drugs. Trump further revealed that the website has been visited over 10 million times and has saved users more than $400 million.

Those numbers are not abstractions. They represent real American families, real prescriptions filled at lower prices, and real savings that have landed in people’s pockets rather than in the profit margins of the pharmaceutical industry. The president has made no secret of his desire to break Big Pharma’s grip on American drug pricing, and the TrumpRx numbers suggest the effort is gaining traction with the public.

Cuban’s Cost Plus Drug Company contributed directly to that expansion, with 559 of the roughly 600 newly listed generic medications coming from his company. Cuban boasted about the “special partnership” with TrumpRx, describing it as the product of a shared commitment to lowering the cost of healthcare for all Americans regardless of party affiliation.

The business logic is not complicated: Cuban built Cost Plus Drugs precisely to undercut the traditional pharmacy pricing model, and TrumpRx is a distribution and visibility channel that sends American consumers directly to his platform. The partnership serves the policy goal and the bottom line simultaneously, which is generally how durable alliances get built.

The backstory of this particular alliance is worth dwelling on at length, because it is a case study in what happens when the performance of political opposition collides with the practical reality of policy results. Mark Cuban is not a man who arrived at the White House on Monday without a history. He spent the better part of a decade constructing a public persona as one of Trump’s most prominent and credible critics from within the business world. He was visible, quotable, and reliable.

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When Trump’s opponents wanted a successful businessman who would say on television that Trump was bad for business, bad for the country, and bad for the culture, Cuban was available and willing.

When asked directly whether he regretted supporting Kamala Harris on the campaign trail, Cuban shut the door: “I’m not going into my politics at all.” That is the statement of a man who has concluded, at least for now, that the political chapter of his public life is a liability rather than an asset, and that the healthcare chapter is where his energy and his legacy are better invested.

It is a reasonable calculation. It is also, whether Cuban would acknowledge it or not, a quiet concession that the political choices he made in 2024 did not produce the outcomes he wanted for the country.

When asked at Politico’s Health Care Summit last month about whether he wants Kamala Harris to run for president again, Cuban said simply: “No.” When asked to recall her message on health care during the 2024 election, he offered this: “Don’t remember, don’t care.”

That is not the language of a man who believes the candidate he campaigned for was robbed of a historic victory by a rigged system. That is the language of a man who has moved on and would prefer the rest of the conversation move on with him.

President Trump was not entirely inclined to let the past dissolve entirely, but he was generous in the way that a man tends to be generous when he has already won. When asked what Cuban’s presence at the White House said about what they were building together, Trump replied without hesitation: “It says we love people, we love our country. He’s got a good company, and he’s going to do a lot of business with us.” He added that he has “a lot of respect for Mark, frankly,” and that he “always has.”

The sentiment was gracious without being sentimental, the kind of thing a confident man says when the outcome of an argument has already been settled.

The TrumpRx initiative itself deserves to be understood on its own terms, separate from the political theater surrounding Cuban’s appearance. The program is a straightforward attempt to use the visibility and credibility of the presidency to direct American consumers toward lower-cost pharmaceutical options that already exist in the marketplace but that many people simply do not know about or have not been systematically pointed toward. The administration is not creating new drugs or building new supply chains.

It is building an on-ramp to lower prices that the industry’s existing pricing structures have made it difficult for ordinary people to find on their own. Whether one likes the president or not, the proposition that Americans should pay less for their medications is not a controversial one, which is precisely why Cuban was willing to stand beside Trump to say so.

The partnership between the White House and Cost Plus Drugs also represents a meaningful policy alignment between an administration that has consistently pushed back against pharmaceutical industry pricing and a company that was built on exactly the same premise.

Cuban launched Cost Plus Drugs in 2022 on the explicit argument that the traditional pharmacy benefit manager model had inflated drug prices far beyond what the underlying economics of manufacturing and distribution required. The company sells drugs at cost plus a 15 percent markup, a $5 dispensing fee, and $5 shipping, a pricing model so transparent and so much lower than the traditional retail pharmacy price on many medications that it effectively shames the incumbent industry every time someone looks up a drug on the platform.

The political symbolism of the day was not lost on anyone in the room. The Democratic Party spent the 2024 election cycle presenting itself as the party of competent, reasonable governance and healthcare affordability, with Cuban as one of its most prominent validators of business.

Less than two years later, that same Cuban is standing in the Trump White House, describing himself as TrumpRx’s biggest proponent after the president himself, while the Democratic candidate he campaigned for cannot be recalled by name or policy when asked directly. That is not a minor footnote to the 2024 election. It is a data point about which party’s healthcare agenda has actually produced something tangible for American consumers.

Cuban’s appearance at the event was not without friction inside his own corner of the internet. He deleted a social media post after backlash from his progressive following over his decision to partner with the Trump administration. The deletion drew more attention than the original post, as deletions usually do, and briefly turned the story from one about drug prices to one about whether Cuban could survive the political consequences of being photographed standing next to the President.

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That his followers responded to a healthcare affordability initiative with enough outrage to compel him to delete a post says something unflattering about the state of progressive politics, where the instinct to punish those who cooperate with the other side apparently extends even to policies that lower the cost of prescription medications.

Cuban’s answer to that backlash, delivered in an email to the Daily Beast, was pointed: “I care about lowering the cost of healthcare. The rest is rage bait.” That is a line worth keeping. Whether or not Cuban would ever admit publicly that voting for Kamala Harris was a mistake, the behavior of his own coalition in response to his appearance at a healthcare event suggests he has at least begun to understand the limits of political tribalism as a guide to policy.

When your own supporters are angry at you for helping lower drug prices because it required standing next to the wrong president, it is reasonable to start questioning whose interests that tribalism actually serves.

For conservative Americans who have watched the political and business establishment unite for years to delegitimize this administration and everything it attempts, Monday’s scene at the White House carries a satisfaction that transcends the specific policy on display.

It is not that Mark Cuban has become a Trump supporter. He clearly has not, and he was careful to make that plain the moment the cameras moved outside. What it represents is something more modest and more important: the acknowledgment, implicit if not explicit, that the results of this administration’s work are real enough that even its opponents cannot entirely ignore them.

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President Donald Trump stepped outside Tuesday and did something no president in modern memory has done: he handed reporters poster board mock-ups of an active construction project on White House grounds and walked them through it himself over the noise of drills and hammers, describing in detail a project that has turned out to be considerably larger, more strategic, and more consequential than its critics understood when they dismissed it as a vanity ballroom.

What the president revealed Tuesday is not a party venue. It is a fortified presidential campus that will reshape the security and operational architecture of the executive branch for generations.

Standing near the construction site with mock-ups in hand, Trump described the massive project as a fortress for himself and future presidents.

“This is a shield that protects everything that’s inside, everything that’s on top,” he said. He added that it would be the “safest building ever built, in my opinion.” The statement was not delivered as a boast. It was delivered as a construction briefing, the kind that a builder gives when he wants the people watching to understand what they are actually looking at rather than what the press has been telling them they are looking at.

Trump explained that the ballroom is only part of the story. He described the ballroom itself as a “shield” of sorts, protecting all of the space currently being built underneath. That includes a military hospital, meeting rooms, and much more. “These are all different rooms out here,” Trump said. “They’re building a hospital. They’re building a military hospital. They’re building all sorts of research facilities, also meeting rooms and rooms that go hand in hand for the military, using the ballroom, and the ballroom is really a shield and protecting all of the things that are built here.”

The underground complex, Trump said, will be six stories deep and include a military hospital, research facilities, and meeting rooms. Among the security features, Trump described “impenetrable steel” and window glass that is “approximately four inches thick.” Four-inch glass is not decorative. It is the kind of specification that belongs on a facility designed to function during active threats, including explosive detonations and high-velocity projectile impacts. This is not a venue designed for state dinners. It is a venue designed to host state dinners while being capable of surviving an attack on the presidency itself.

The roof, Trump said, will have “massive drone capacity” and will act as a “drone port” so it “protects all of Washington.” In the post-drone threat environment that the American military has been grappling with since the proliferation of small UAS technology, a drone-capable roof on the presidential campus is not a luxury. It is a direct response to an identified vulnerability.

The foiled shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2026 served as a visceral reminder that events held outside the White House grounds, in venues with far lower security profiles, carry risks that are not manageable by the existing Secret Service protective infrastructure.

Trump made the connection to that incident directly, posting on Truth Social immediately after the foiled attack: “What happened last night is exactly the reason that our great Military, Secret Service, Law Enforcement, and, for different reasons, every President for the last 150 years, have been DEMANDING that a large, safe, and secure Ballroom be built ON THE GROUNDS OF THE WHITE HOUSE. This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House. It cannot be built fast enough!”

The president’s logic is not difficult to follow. The Correspondents’ Dinner is one of Washington’s most high-profile annual events, drawing the president, cabinet members, senior military officials, congressional leaders, and hundreds of media figures to a hotel ballroom that is, by definition, outside the secure perimeter of the White House.

Securing a hotel ballroom to presidential-level standards for a single evening is an enormously expensive, logistically demanding, and ultimately imperfect undertaking. Moving the event inside a permanent, purpose-built, military-grade facility on White House grounds solves the problem structurally rather than repeatedly, year after year, at significant cost and with irreducible risk.

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Trump framed the integrated design of the facility in terms that reflected genuine architectural and engineering thinking: “The roof goes with the ground floor; the ground floor goes with the roof. The roof also goes down into the basement. Everything is connected.

Intertwined, elevators, heating, air conditioning. It’s one building. That’s why we’re trying to explain that this is one well-knit building.” That description is the language of a builder explaining why a project that looks like several separate initiatives from the outside is, in structural and systems terms, a single integrated facility. The ballroom, the underground hospital, the research facilities, the meeting rooms, the drone-capable roof, and the glass bridge connecting it all to the Executive Residence are not separate projects. They are one building.

A glass bridge will link the ballroom to the Executive Residence, allowing guests to experience panoramic views of the grounds while moving between buildings and making logistics manageable during inclement weather.

For anyone who has attended a White House event conducted in an outdoor tent on the South Lawn, which former presidents resorted to at a cost of over a million dollars per event and which a former White House chef once described as leaving guests “elbow to elbow” in conditions he called “embarrassing,” the practical improvement this represents is not hard to appreciate.

The traditional venue for formal White House events has been the East Room of the Executive Residence, with a seating capacity of 200 people. Trump has repeatedly described the tent solution used by his predecessors as “not a pretty sight.”

The numbers speak plainly. A country of 340 million people, with the most powerful economy and military in human history, hosting its heads of state and allies in a tent on the lawn because the permanent structure it uses for formal events seats 200 people, is a gap between national ambition and physical infrastructure that has gone unaddressed for far too long. Trump identified it years ago, as far back as 2010, and has spent his presidency doing something about it.

The White House announced in January 2026 that the banquet hall would be 22,000 square feet, and that the project would also include offices for the First Lady and a movie theater. The First Lady’s offices represent a functional upgrade that is long overdue. The current White House, despite its historical significance, has never been fully equipped as a modern working residence for the most prominent family in American public life. Space for First Lady programming, meetings, and staff operations has always been a secondary consideration. The new East Wing complex addresses that directly.

The financing of the project has been a target of sustained criticism from the left and from institutional Washington, which has argued that the scale and cost of the construction represent an inappropriate use of donated funds and presidential authority. Trump has been consistent in his response: taxpayers are not paying for the ballroom itself, which is funded through private donations.

The president has confirmed that he is personally among the donors, though he has not publicly disclosed the specific amount. The donor list that the White House released in October 2025 includes some of the most prominent names in American industry and technology, among them Meta, Apple, Google, and Amazon, as well as individual donors from finance, real estate, and other sectors.

Trump repeatedly said that taxpayers will not foot the $400 million bill for the ballroom renovation, and stated: “I am honored to be the first President to finally get this much-needed project, which is on time and under budget, underway. When completed, it will be the Greatest and Most Beautiful Ballroom of its kind anywhere in the World, and a fabulous complement to our Beautiful and Storied White House!” The claim of being on time and under budget is one that Trump’s critics have challenged, pointing to the project’s cost growth from initial estimates. The president has maintained that the final product will justify the investment.

The legal history of the project reflects the broader pattern of institutional resistance that has met most of the Trump administration’s ambitious initiatives. The National Trust filed a lawsuit in December 2025 alleging violations of the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, arguing the construction was fast-tracked without adequate review. The Trump administration responded that construction must continue for classified national security reasons.

The Commission of Fine Arts, appointed by Trump, voted 6 to 0 in February 2026 to approve the renovation. The National Capital Planning Commission approved the plans in April 2026 after mandating certain design changes, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has allowed construction to continue pending a hearing scheduled for June 5.

The underground military hospital dimension of the project deserves particular emphasis in the post-Correspondents’ Dinner shooting environment. A presidential campus that includes a fully capable military medical facility represents a qualitative upgrade in the executive branch’s emergency preparedness posture that no amount of off-site medical planning can fully replicate.

The difference between a president receiving immediate on-site military medical care and being transported to Walter Reed under fire is not a marginal operational consideration. It is the kind of decision that gets made once and either is or is not right.

In March 2026, Trump told reporters that the military was constructing a massive fortified complex beneath the ballroom, and White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the U.S. military was upgrading facilities under the new East Wing.

The military’s direct involvement in the construction of an underground complex beneath the presidential residence is not a decorating decision. It is a national security infrastructure investment of the first order, one that will serve every president and every administration that follows this one, regardless of party.

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The critics who have described the project as gaudy, ostentatious, or out of touch have been addressing the ballroom’s aesthetic in isolation from its functional and strategic purpose. That criticism reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what is actually being built. A six-story underground complex with a military hospital, research facilities, fortified meeting rooms, impenetrable steel walls, four-inch glass, a drone port on the roof, and a glass bridge connecting it to the White House is not a party venue.

It is the most significant upgrade to the physical security and operational capability of the American presidency since the construction of the West Wing over a century ago.

Trump was direct about the nature of the gift he is delivering to the American government: “This is a gift to the United States of America, and more than a gift. It’s going to be one of the most beautiful buildings that’s ever been built in the country or in Washington, D.C.”

Whether the aesthetic result matches the ambition will be for history to judge. What cannot be disputed, based on Tuesday’s tour, is that the project’s scope extends far beyond what the coverage of it has reflected, that the national security dimensions are real and substantial, and that the president who is building it has been thinking about it longer, and in more operational detail, than most of his critics have been willing to credit.

The White House has been renovated, expanded, and rebuilt across two and a half centuries of American history. Every president who has made significant changes to the building has faced critics who called the changes inappropriate, excessive, or disrespectful of tradition. The building that stands today bears almost no physical resemblance to the structure that John Adams first occupied.

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A comprehensive study by the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters, provided exclusively to the New York Post, has confirmed with documented precision what tens of millions of conservative Americans have been saying for decades about Saturday Night Live: the show is not a comedy program with political opinions. It is a political operation with comedy as its cover.

Season 51 of NBC’s Saturday Night Live recently came to an end, and it was considerably more liberal than Season 50. NewsBusters analysts found that Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che combined to tell 217 out of 238 jokes, or 91 percent, about conservatives during Season 51.

They also told 18 about liberals and three nonpartisan jokes.

The full scope of the numbers destroys any pretense of comedic balance. Of the 226 political jokes delivered by Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che, 205 targeted conservatives, only 18 slammed Democrats and other liberals, and three were non-partisan.

During cold opens, actors playing Republicans and conservatives appeared 49 times, lefty characters only 10 times, and one nonpartisan character was featured.

The top ten targets in Weekend Update tell the complete story without needing further analysis. The list featured President Trump at 108, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 15, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at 12, Tucker Carlson at 11, former Rep. George Santos at 10, First Lady Melania Trump at 7, Vice President JD Vance at 7, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at 5, Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 5, and FBI Director Kash Patel at 5.

The lone liberal in the top ten is Andrew Cuomo, a disgraced former governor who is politically toxic even among Democrats and whose inclusion provides the thinnest possible cover for the claim that the show does not exclusively target the right.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has been one of the most prominent progressive political figures in the country this year, appeared exactly once. One joke. One appearance. For the man who is the socialist mayor of the largest city in America.

The contrast with the 108 jokes aimed at Trump is the quantitative expression of a political operation, not a comedy writers’ room.

One of Che’s jokes appeared to make fun of assassination attempts on the president. Che said: “President Trump attended the opening night of ‘Chicago’ at the Kennedy Center, and I think that’s cool that the president is going to the theater. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen,” referring to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at a theater.

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That joke aired in the weeks following the third alleged assassination attempt on Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which a Secret Service agent was shot in the chest and survived only because of his ballistic vest.

The decision to make a theater-assassination joke about a man who had recently survived a literal assassination attempt in a public venue is the kind of editorial choice that no professional comedy organization with a functioning conscience would make.

A whopping 94 percent of the jokes delivered by late-night hosts during the first week of Operation Eric Fury slammed the United States and its allies instead of Iran and other adversaries. And 92 percent of jokes made by Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and the Daily Show universe targeted the right in 2025, with liberal guests outnumbering conservative ones almost 100 to 1. SNL is not an outlier in the late-night television ecosystem.

It is the flagship of a coordinated entertainment media apparatus that has decided its function is Democratic Party advocacy dressed in comedy writing. The data documents what that advocacy looks like at the joke-by-joke level.

The season finale on May 16 featured James Austin Johnson’s Trump character in a cold open alongside Will Ferrell playing the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein.

The skit took shots at the president for his acquaintance with the late notorious sex offender, including a quip in which Trump says his approval was in the 30s, and Ferrell’s Epstein said “Call me when you hit 17.” The decision to make a child sexual abuse joke, with a pedophile’s preferred victim age as the punchline, as the finale’s political statement represents a creative and moral judgment that the show’s audience and its NBC parent company should be asked to defend publicly.

MRC President David Bozell said in a statement: “Michael Jordan famously said, ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too.’ Entertainment companies once understood that alienating half the country was probably not a great business model. Nobody is asking SNL to become conservative, but when every political punchline is nothing more than all Trump Derangement Syndrome all the time, SNL risks turning itself into a caricature of what it once was.”

Bozell’s Michael Jordan observation is the appropriate commercial framing for what the data describes. SNL is not just politically biased. It is commercially self-destructive in its bias, choosing to alienate roughly half of its potential audience on every episode because the writers’ room and the host selection process have systematically excluded people who would write jokes about Democrats.

The prior season’s comparable number was 82 percent. Season 51’s number is 91 percent. The trend is not toward balance. It is toward the intensification of a partisan comedy operation that has abandoned any pretense of speaking to all of America and instead functions as the most-watched left-wing political message delivery system in American prime-time television.

The 9-point jump from 82 to 91 percent in a single season suggests either that the Trump administration’s second term has intensified the writers’ partisan focus or that the departure of writers or cast members who maintained any residual instinct for balance has created an even more homogeneous creative environment.

The comparison with SNL’s historical programming is instructive. The show’s early years under Lorne Michaels in the 1970s were genuinely transgressive in ways that cut across political lines. Gerald Ford’s physical clumsiness was mocked. Jimmy Carter was mocked.

The show’s comedic sensibility was irreverent toward power in ways that did not systematically exempt one party from scrutiny.

The evolution from a show that mocked everyone to a show that directs 91 percent of its political content at one party is not a creative evolution. It is a political capture of a cultural institution that has enough brand recognition to sustain its audience despite becoming something fundamentally different from what it once was.

The NBC network that airs SNL has not responded to requests for comment on the study. That silence is the appropriate institutional response for an organization that cannot defend the numbers and would rather not amplify the conversation about them.

The 91 percent figure is not contested by the network because it cannot be contested. The jokes are on tape. They are countable. The methodology is transparent. The conclusion is the conclusion of the arithmetic.

The practical consequence of SNL’s documented political monoculture is not merely that conservative Americans feel excluded from a cultural institution that their grandparents helped make into a television landmark. It is that the show functions as unpaid political advertising for the Democratic Party at a scale that no single political advertiser could purchase.

Sketch comedy that portrays every Republican as corrupt, every conservative as foolish, and every Trump administration official as villainous, broadcast on NBC to millions of Americans every Saturday night, shapes cultural attitudes about politics in ways that the Federal Election Commission does not and cannot acknowledge.

The MAGA audience’s relationship with SNL has evolved from outrage to indifference to something closer to contempt for the show’s creative limitations.

When 91 percent of your political jokes target the same people, your comedy writing is not being tested against the full range of political human experience. It is being written in an echo chamber that produces comedy that is funny to the people who already agree with the premise and baffling to everyone else.

The show’s ratings reflect that creative narrowing, and the commercial consequences of choosing partisan loyalty over artistic range will continue to accumulate regardless of what any study documents.

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The 18 jokes about liberals in a full season of 20 episodes are the detail that most concisely summarizes SNL’s editorial posture.

Eighteen jokes about the entire political left in 20 episodes of a show that has access to the Biden cognitive decline, the Kamala Harris campaign implosion, the Feeding Our Future fraud, the Hunter Biden laptop, the autopen pardon controversy, the AOC presidential speculation, the Buttigieg popular vote confusion, and every other piece of genuinely funny political material that the left side of the spectrum has generated this year. Eighteen.

The writers chose not to use any of it because using it would require the kind of professional courage that a writers’ room that has spent years generating its social belonging from shared contempt for conservatives has entirely lost the capacity to exercise.

The Season 51 study is the most comprehensive single-season documentation of SNL’s political bias that has been produced in this analysis framework.

Combined with the prior season’s 82 percent figure and the broader late-night data showing 92 percent conservative targeting across the television comedy landscape, it establishes that what is happening at SNL is not an aberration or an exception but a feature of an entertainment media ecosystem that has chosen sides as deliberately and explicitly as any political campaign.

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Two United States Navy EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft collided in midair during an aerial demonstration at the Gunfighter Skies Air Show at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Western Idaho on Sunday, May 17, 2026, with all four crew members ejecting safely as the two aircraft locked together in a sandwiched configuration before spinning to the ground and exploding in a massive fireball, in what aviation safety experts are describing as a near-miraculous survival that defied the standard probability of midair collision outcomes.

All four crew members ejected safely after two Navy jets collided and crashed on Sunday during an air show at Mountain Home Air Force Base. The collision involved two US Navy EA-18G Growlers from the Electronic Attack Squadron 129 in Whidbey Island, Washington. The aircraft were performing an aerial demonstration when the crash happened.

After the two Navy jets collided in midair, the planes sandwiched together; all four crew members were able to eject and deploy their parachutes, floating down to safety as the aircraft careened into a field, exploding into a fireball.

The collision happened Sunday during the Gunfighter Skies air show at Mountain Home Air Force Base some 57 miles southwest of Boise.

The survival of all four crew members is being described by aviation professionals as genuinely extraordinary. Billie Flynn, a former F-35 senior test pilot and demonstration expert, called the fact that all four were able to safely eject and make it to the ground without landing in the wreckage truly remarkable.

Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said that may have been possible because of the way the planes collided and appeared to remain stuck together in midair before falling to Earth. Crews usually don’t have a chance to eject in a midair collision, he said.

“It’s really striking to see. It looks like they struck each other in a very unique fashion to cause them to remain intact and kind of stick to each other and that very well could have saved them.”

The sequence of events was captured on video by multiple spectators and by photographer Shane Ogden, who had been filming the aircraft when the collision occurred. Ogden said he was filming the two jets as they came close together.

A video he captured shows the two aircraft appear to make contact and then spin in tandem as the crew members eject and their parachutes open. The planes then fall together, exploding into a fireball upon impact as the crew members drift to the ground nearby. “I was just filming thinking they were going to split apart and that happened, and I filmed the rest,” Ogden said.

A witness who recorded a video on Instagram said: “I heard someone next to me say, ‘We are down.’ I turned around and saw four parachutes coming down, then black smoke appeared.”

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The simultaneous sight of four parachutes opening in the air above the crash site while the aircraft fell together to the ground is the image that has defined media coverage of the incident and that has been shared millions of times across social media platforms since Sunday afternoon.

Videos of the collision suggest human error is to blame. Before colliding, the video shows they were trying to line up closely, wing tip to wing tip, but failed to safely rejoin in formation, a routine maneuver. Officials have not yet released any information about what may have contributed to the crash.

The formation rejoining maneuver is a standard element of air show aerial demonstrations, requiring pilots to bring aircraft that have separated to close proximity with extremely precise speed and position control. The margin for error is minimal and the consequences of misjudging closure rate or angle are exactly what the video of Sunday’s crash documents.

Aviation safety expert John Cox, who is CEO of Safety Operating Systems, said the pilots who perform at air shows are among the best, but there is little room for error. The EA-18G Growler pilots from Electronic Attack Squadron 129, based at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington State, are among the most experienced aviators in the United States Navy.

The skill required to fly the Growler’s sophisticated electronic warfare systems while executing the formation and maneuver requirements of an air show demonstration is considerable, and the occurrence of the collision does not reflect on the professional caliber of the aviators involved but on the inherent risk of high-precision formation flying at low altitude before a crowd.

The EA-18G Growler, measuring just over 60 feet long, made its first flight in August 2006 and was the first newly designed electronic warfare aircraft produced in more than 35 years, according to the Navy. Its baptism of fire was in 2011 in Libya, and since then it has been used worldwide.

The Growler variants used in Sunday’s crash are among the most capable and expensive aircraft in the Navy’s inventory. Each one of these planes cost roughly $67 million.

The loss of two $67 million aircraft in a single Sunday morning incident represents approximately $134 million in military hardware, a significant material cost that accompanies the near-catastrophic human cost that was averted by the ejection system’s performance.

This is the third major incident in 23 years at the Gunfighters Air Show and the first airshow since a hiatus resulting from a fatal 2018 civilian glider incident.

The Gunfighter Skies Air Show had returned to Mountain Home Air Force Base after a multi-year pause that followed the 2018 incident and was holding its event over a two-day period when Sunday’s collision occurred. The base announced a lockdown at 12:30 p.m. local time.

Later, as emergency personnel responded, guests were asked to remain on the base so the crews could work freely before they were eventually allowed to leave around 3 p.m.

Col. David R. Gunter, wing commander of the 366th Fighter Wing, which is known as the Gunfighters and is housed at the base, said in a statement: “First and foremost, we are incredibly thankful that everyone involved in today’s incident is safe.

The extraordinary professionalism of our emergency response teams, including city and county, allowed for quick response to the aircrew as well as securing the scene to ensure the safety of our guests, performers and community.”

Only one of the four crew members on the two planes was injured and was being treated at a hospital. The injury was not life-threatening.

The single non-life-threatening injury among four crew members who ejected from two colliding aircraft is the detail that underscores just how remarkable the survival outcome was. Ejection from a fighter jet at low altitude during an air show maneuver, with another aircraft in immediate proximity, represents one of the highest-risk ejection scenarios in military aviation. All four crew members are alive.

Silver Wings of Idaho, the volunteer board that worked alongside Mountain Home Air Force Base to plan and support the Gunfighter Skies 2026 Airshow, released a statement: “Today was an emotional and difficult day at Gunfighter Skies. While the events were not what anyone expected, we are incredibly grateful and relieved that all four pilots involved are safe. That is, and always will be, the most important thing. Our hearts are with everyone affected today, the pilots, their families, the crews, and all those who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make this event possible.”

Mountain Home Mayor Rich Sykes added his comments on the event, confirming that no additional injuries beyond the one crew member being treated were reported. The emergency response from Mountain Home Air Force Base personnel, city and county first responders, and Air St. Luke’s medical helicopter service was praised by multiple officials as having been rapid, professional, and effective in securing the scene and ensuring the safety of the thousands of spectators who had gathered at the base for what was expected to be a celebration of American airpower and aviation history.

The skills used in air show performances are different from those used in day-to-day routine flying or flying in combat. The Iran war has led to the cancellation of some air shows this year at bases where military units are flying missions related to the conflict. The operational context of the crash is relevant. American military aviation resources have been significantly strained by the Iran conflict, which has required sustained deployment of naval air assets including Growler-equipped electronic warfare squadrons to support the Strait of Hormuz enforcement and the broader regional air campaign. Electronic Attack Squadron 129, the Whidbey Island unit whose aircraft were involved in Sunday’s crash, operates aircraft that have been directly employed in the Iran conflict’s electronic warfare dimension.

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The Navy will lead the investigation into the cause of Sunday’s collision. Investigators may be able to quickly get an idea of what happened in Sunday’s crash because the crews of both planes survived and will be able to tell investigators what they saw and experienced before the collision. The Navy will lead the investigation, so there won’t be as much information shared publicly as in civilian crashes. The survival of all four crew members means that the investigation will have firsthand accounts from everyone aboard both aircraft, significantly accelerating the fact-finding process compared to investigations where crew fatalities eliminate the primary witnesses.

The broader air show safety record provides context for Sunday’s incident. There used to be an average of 3.8 deaths a year at US air shows from 1991 to 2006. That number has been steadily improving and since 2017 there have only been an average of 1.1 deaths per year. There were no air show deaths in 2025 or 2023, and a spectator hasn’t been killed at an air show in the US in recent memory. The industry’s sustained improvement in safety outcomes reflects decades of deliberate work by show organizers, military and civilian aviation authorities, and the International Council of Air Shows to implement better planning, box protocols, and performance standards that minimize risk to crews and spectators alike.

Sunday’s crash at Mountain Home Air Force Base will become part of that safety improvement process. The ejection system’s performance in an extraordinarily difficult scenario, saving all four crew members from two aircraft that locked together and fell to the ground in a fireball, will be documented, analyzed, and incorporated into the training and safety frameworks that protect the next generation of air show performers and the audiences who gather to watch them.

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Tommy Robinson’s second Unite the Kingdom rally descended on central London on Saturday, May 16, 2026, drawing tens of thousands of protesters to Parliament Square in one of the largest explicitly anti-Islam demonstrations in modern British history, featuring stage performances that included a trio of French women from the Collectif Nemesis group removing burqas to thunderous crowd approval; a cellist performing while draped in raw bacon in a provocative anti-Islamic gesture; and multiple speakers calling for the removal of Islam from British public institutions, producing immediate and furious condemnation from Muslim organizations, Labour MPs, Amnesty International, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer while simultaneously demonstrating the extraordinary grassroots energy that Robinson has assembled around a message that the British establishment has consistently tried to suppress rather than engage with substantively.

Tens of thousands of supporters of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, marched through central London on 16 May 2026 for the second major Unite the Kingdom rally, culminating in speeches at Parliament Square.

The day saw anti-Islam theatrics on the main stage, a mass government ban on foreign far-right speakers, 43 arrests, and a guerrilla counter-stunt that drew more attention than the event itself.

The burqa removal was the moment that generated the most sustained international attention and the most intense political response.

On one occasion, a trio of French women took to the stage dressed in black hijabs and niqabs. They danced around to chants of “Take it off!” before removing the Islamic clothing to roaring cheers from the crowd.

The three women were members of Collectif Nemesis, a French organization that identifies as feminist and anti-Islam and that frames its opposition to Islamic dress as a defense of women’s rights against what it characterizes as religiously mandated oppression.

The French anti-migrant and Islamophobic group Collectif Nemesis, led by Alice Cordier, describes itself as feminist and identitarian and rejects migration into Europe.

“We are alone against the system that wants to destroy our Christian ccivilization,”Cordier said. The group’s presence on the Unite the Kingdom stage represents the international dimension of the rally, which drew speakers and attendees from across Europe who share Robinson’s perspective on Islam and migration as existential threats to Western European civilization and identity.

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At the rally, speaking to a pro-Israel activist, Robinson was filmed saying he “would stop Islam” if he was in charge of the country.

He called for remigration and said he would have the military remove migrants from hotels housing them. Robinson added that “it’s time for many Muslims to leave this country.”

On stage Robinson told the crowd to prepare for the battle of Britain. Robinson’s statements at his own rally represent a consistent and escalating posture toward the Muslim population of Britain that has characterized his public advocacy since he founded the English Defence League in 2009 and that has remained the defining theme of every major public event he has organized.

Another speaker, Kellie-Jay Keen, who describes herself as a women’s rights activist, called for Islam to be removed from all public institutions, including classrooms, official offices, and public buildings.

In her speech, she said “it’s not too late to get Islam out of our classrooms” and described it as “absolutely vital” to remove Islam from “every single place” in order to “save this country.” Keen, who calls herself Posie Parker and leads a small political party called the Party of Women, frames her anti-Islam position as a feminist argument about the incompatibility of Islam’s treatment of women with the equality principles of Western liberal democracy, a framing that is distinct from Robinson’s more explicitly nationalist rhetoric even where the policy conclusion is similar.

The British government’s response to the rally included a significant restriction on foreign speakers. Those refused entry included Valentina Gomez, a Colombian-American anti-Islam influencer who at the 2025 rally had called for Muslims to be sent back to their Sharia nations; Dutch activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek; and Polish politician Dominik Tarczyński.

The mass government ban on foreign speakers, executed through border control decisions before the rally date, represents a specific form of state intervention in political speech that the government applied to one side of the ideological debate surrounding the event.

The police deployment for the event was substantial. Around 4,000 UK police officers were deployed across central London to manage the rally alongside concurrent pro-Palestine demonstrations and the FA Cup final.

The concurrent pro-Palestinian march, which drew its own significant crowds, meant that central London was simultaneously managing two large and ideologically opposed demonstrations, creating the operational challenge that the Metropolitan Police had been planning for in the weeks preceding the event.

The Metropolitan Police released a detailed breakdown of the 43 arrests during the central London public order policing operation. Metropolitan Police also confirmed that a Muslim officer was abused at the protest, posting that footage had been widely shared and that nobody should have to put up with abuse at work.

The turnout question is being contested between organizers and critics. Organisers of the event originally claimed they could amass more than the 150,000 participants who attended the first Unite The Kingdom rally in September 2025.

However, reports claim the actual turnout of Saturday’s rally could be under 50,000, less than half of the previous turnout. The September 2025 first rally, which drew figures estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000 depending on the source, was the largest explicitly right-wing demonstration in modern British political history. Whether Saturday’s figure represents a meaningful decline in the movement’s mobilization capacity or reflects the deterrent effect of the foreign speaker bans and extensive pre-event government messaging is a disputed question.

The political context in which the rally occurred amplifies its significance considerably. The rally came a week after Reform UK’s surge in local elections, with Robinson encouraging supporters to join political parties ahead of the next general election. Five Labour cabinet members resigned the same week, and a fifth of the parliamentary Labour Party has reportedly called on Starmer to step down, leaving the government visibly weakened heading into a period of heightened social tension.

Robinson’s explicit encouragement for his supporters to channel their energy into Reform UK rather than street protest represents a strategic evolution that the British political establishment has been slow to process. A movement that was manageable as long as it remained on the street protest fringe becomes significantly more consequential when it is actively directing its members into a parliamentary party that is already surging in local elections. The Unite the Kingdom rally is not just a demonstration. It is increasingly a mobilization exercise for a movement that believes it has a path to political power through conventional electoral channels.

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The left’s rage at the rally’s content has been immediate, comprehensive, and uniform. Amnesty International UK characterized the march as an exercise in hate dressed up as patriotism. Prime Minister Keir Starmer described it in similar terms. Labor MPs called for Metropolitan Police investigations into specific speeches. Muslim civil society organizations demanded government condemnation of ministers who had not publicly denounced the event’s content.

What the left’s rage has consistently failed to engage with is the underlying social and political conditions that have produced a movement capable of drawing tens of thousands of British citizens into central London on a Saturday afternoon to hear speakers call for the removal of Islam from British public life.

The questions about grooming gangs; about the handling of complaints by the social services and police in cities including Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford; and about the degree to which institutions deferred accountability for politically sensitive conduct are questions that Robinson built his following on and that the political establishment’s consistent refusal to engage with honestly has kept alive as organizing fuel for everything that happened on Parliament Square on May 16.

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John Kiriakou, the former CIA counterterrorism officer who became the agency’s most prominent whistleblower after publicly confirming the government’s waterboarding program and serving 23 months in federal prison for his disclosures, has stated in multiple recent interviews and public appearances that based on his firsthand experience inside the CIA during and after September 11, 2001, he does not believe the attacks were planned or enabled by the United States government, directly challenging one of the most persistent and widely circulated conspiracy theories in modern American political culture.

Kiriakou’s institutional credibility on this specific question is considerable: he was named Chief of Counterterrorism Operations in Pakistan after the attacks, led the CIA team that captured Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking Al-Qaeda operative taken alive, and has demonstrated through his whistleblowing record a willingness to say things the government does not want said when he believes the public interest requires it.

Kiriakou’s career at the CIA from 1990 to 2004 placed him at the center of the most significant counterterrorism operations in the agency’s history. He began as a Middle East analyst before transitioning into operations, eventually serving overseas tours in Bahrain, Greece, and Pakistan.

After the September 11 attacks, he was assigned as chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan at precisely the moment when the CIA’s focus was most intensely directed at the Al-Qaeda network that had carried out the attacks. He organized the raids that led to the capture of multiple Al-Qaeda members and led the team that captured Abu Zubaydah in March 2002.

His institutional proximity to the intelligence and operational response to September 11 gives his views on the attacks’ origins a grounding in firsthand institutional knowledge that almost no other public commentator possesses.

In his Diary of a CEO interview with Steven Bartlett in January 2026, Kiriakou described the atmosphere inside the CIA on September 11 in terms that capture the genuine institutional shock of that morning. He described the agency’s alert level system, in which routine signals barely register and critic-level messages represent the most dire possible warnings, and he said simply: “9/11. That’s a critic.”

The description of the attacks reaching the highest possible institutional alarm level, reserved for events of the magnitude of the embassy walls coming down or an active war beginning, is consistent with the accounts of CIA personnel across multiple memoirs and histories who describe September 11 as a genuinely unforeseen catastrophe rather than a staged event.

The CIA’s documented failure to prevent September 11 has been the foundation on which inside-job theories have built their case. If the CIA had information about the hijackers, the argument runs, that information must have been deliberately ignored rather than lost in the bureaucratic gaps between agencies that the 9/11 Commission documented.

The Commission’s finding that there had been, in its words, a failure of imagination rather than a deliberate stand-down is the official explanation, and it is the explanation that Kiriakou’s own institutional experience most directly supports.

Kiriakou has spoken publicly about the documented Saudi connection to the 9/11 attacks, a connection that is distinct from the inside job theory and represents a genuinely troubling aspect of the attacks’ origin story that has been the subject of sustained congressional interest, FOIA litigation, and ultimately partial declassification of the FBI’s 28 pages of investigative materials.

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He told the Scott Horton Show in a December 2022 interview that the Saudi connection and the CIA-FBI rivalry that complicated the pre-attack intelligence sharing are documented institutional failures worth examining. Those failures are not evidence of a deliberate American government plot.

They are evidence of the kind of institutional dysfunctions that produce genuine intelligence failures.

The distinction between a documented intelligence failure and a deliberate government conspiracy is the analytical line that Kiriakou draws when asked about inside job theories.

His response in the most recent public appearances where the question has been directly posed has been consistent: the evidence he saw inside the CIA, the operational response to the attacks, the genuine shock that characterized the institutional reaction, and the documented nature of Al-Qaeda’s operational planning for the attacks as reconstructed by the 9/11 Commission do not support the conclusion that the American government planned or enabled the attacks.

He has acknowledged that there are aspects of the attacks and their aftermath that remain inadequately explained and that deserve continued scrutiny, particularly the Saudi financial connections and the pre-attack intelligence failures. But inadequate explanation is not the same as deliberate concealment of an inside job.

Kiriakou’s whistleblowing record makes him a particularly credible voice on the question of what the American government is capable of concealing when it wants to.

He confirmed waterboarding at a time when the Bush administration was engaged in active denial of the practice. He was subsequently prosecuted and imprisoned by the Obama administration for a disclosure unrelated to the waterboarding confirmation.

He knows from personal experience what it costs to say publicly things that powerful institutions want kept private.

His willingness to incur those costs while simultaneously maintaining that the September 11 attacks were not an inside job is the combination of credibility and courage that gives his position its weight.

The 9/11 inside job theory has maintained remarkable durability in American political culture across the more than two decades since the attacks. Polls have consistently found a significant minority of Americans, ranging from 10 to 25 percent depending on the survey methodology, who believe the government had foreknowledge of or direct involvement in planning the attacks.

That belief has been sustained by a combination of genuine unanswered questions about the events of September 11, justified distrust of government institutions that have been demonstrated to lie about other significant events, and the human tendency toward explanatory frameworks that attribute catastrophic events to deliberate agency rather than systemic failure.

The CIA’s actual intelligence failures in the lead-up to September 11 are documented and acknowledged. The agency tracked two of the future hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, to a January 2000 Al-Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, then lost track of them, then failed to notify the FBI when they were discovered to have entered the United States.

The documented CIA-FBI rivalry that prevented the sharing of information that might have enabled intervention before the attacks is the kind of institutional dysfunction that produces genuine catastrophic intelligence failure without requiring a conspiracy. It is the explanation that Kiriakou, who was inside the institutional structure producing that dysfunction, finds most consistent with what he observed.

The Abu Zubaydah capture and its aftermath placed Kiriakou at the center of the most consequential early post-September 11 counterterrorism operation. Abu Zubaydah was considered Al-Qaeda’s third-ranking official at the time of his capture. Kiriakou led the team that found him. He sat with Abu Zubaydah for days after his capture, engaging the prisoner directly.

The intelligence gathered from that operation shaped the early understanding of Al-Qaeda’s structure, its planning processes, and its relationship with the broader jihadist network that had carried out the September 11 attacks. Kiriakou’s firsthand access to that intelligence gives him a perspective on Al-Qaeda’s operational reality that is unavailable to the vast majority of commentators on September 11.

The inside job theory requires believing that the entire Al-Qaeda narrative, the camps in Afghanistan, the Hamburg cell, the operational planning that the 9/11 Commission documented across multiple years and multiple countries, the financial flows from Saudi Arabia, the training of the hijackers at American flight schools, and the final coordination of the attacks were either fabricated or knowingly enabled by the American government.

Kiriakou’s response to that theory is the response of a man who participated in the real intelligence and operational response to September 11 and who finds the alternative narrative unpersuasive against the weight of what he actually witnessed.

The timing and context of Kiriakou’s recent public statements on September 11 are relevant to understanding their purpose.

The Trump administration’s UAP disclosure initiative, the Epstein Files release, the ongoing COVID origins accountability effort, and the broader declassification push that has characterized the second term have created a cultural moment in which previously suppressed or classified government information is becoming public in significant quantities.

That cultural moment has also produced a renewed appetite for revisiting conspiracy theories about major historical events, including September 11.

Kiriakou’s willingness to engage with the September 11 question directly, rather than deflecting it as too politically sensitive, reflects the same personal courage that led him to confirm waterboarding in 2007 and to continue speaking publicly about government misconduct despite having served prison time for related disclosures. His conclusion that September 11 was most likely not an inside job is not the conclusion of a government loyalist defending the official narrative.

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It is the conclusion of the CIA’s most prominent internal critic, a man who has demonstrated across his post-CIA career that he is willing to say what he believes regardless of institutional preference. That combination, institutional credibility, documented courage, and firsthand proximity to the events in question, gives his assessment of the inside job theory a weight that deserves serious consideration by anyone wrestling with the question.

The questions that remain legitimately open about September 11, including the full extent of Saudi government officials’ knowledge of and support for the hijackers, the precise nature of the pre-attack intelligence failures and the institutional decisions that produced them, and the degree to which the post-attack response including the Iraq War was shaped by deliberate manipulation of incomplete intelligence, are questions worth pursuing through rigorous investigation and continued declassification.

They are not questions that require accepting the inside job conclusion. They are questions about failures, misconduct, and institutional dysfunction that are serious enough on their own terms without the additional layer of a deliberate domestic conspiracy for which Kiriakou, the man who was inside the CIA on the morning of September 11, says the evidence does not exist.

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Generation Z is now leading the entire nation in church attendance.

According to respected Barna Group research, Gen Z Christians are attending church services an average of 1.9 weekends per month. This outpaces Millennials at 1.8, Gen X at 1.6, and Baby Boomers at 1.4.

This marks the highest recorded church attendance rate for young adults in Barna’s extensive tracking history. For the first time in modern memory, the youngest generation is the most faithful in showing up.

The surge represents nearly double the attendance rates Gen Z recorded during the low points of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. Young Americans are returning to faith in impressive numbers.

Pastors across evangelical, Catholic, and traditional Protestant congregations report seeing noticeably more young faces in the pews. Many describe it as the beginning of a genuine spiritual revival.

This development stands in sharp contrast to the dire predictions of secular elites who claimed religion was dying among the young. The data proves them wrong once again.

Conservatives have long argued that the radical progressive agenda pushed in schools, media, and universities would eventually leave young people empty and searching for truth. That moment appears to have arrived.

Gen Z has grown up in a world of social media addiction, gender confusion, economic uncertainty, and cultural chaos. Many are discovering that only faith provides real meaning and stability.

Young men in particular are driving much of this resurgence. They are rejecting the feminized, weak messaging of modern culture and embracing masculine faith, responsibility, and leadership in church communities.

This return to church among young men is flipping long-standing trends and strengthening families for the future. Strong fathers rooted in faith build stronger homes and communities.

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The left’s relentless attack on traditional values, Christianity, and American heritage has produced a powerful backlash. Gen Z is proving immune to the indoctrination that captured previous generations.

Barna’s findings reveal that practicing Gen Z Christians are not just attending more often but are also showing higher levels of spiritual commitment and engagement in Bible study and prayer.

This spiritual renewal comes at a critical time for America. As the nation faces moral decay, family breakdown, and cultural division, a faithful younger generation offers a path toward restoration.

President Trump’s leadership and the broader America First movement have created space for these positive cultural shifts. When government stops attacking faith and starts protecting religious liberty, good things follow.

Churches that preach biblical truth without compromise are seeing the strongest growth among young people. Watered-down, progressive Christianity continues to decline while authentic faith thrives.

Faith leaders are celebrating this trend as evidence that God is moving powerfully among America’s youth. The next generation is choosing light over darkness.

Increased church attendance among Gen Z correlates with growing conservative values on issues like life, family, and freedom. Young believers are more likely to reject radical left ideologies.

This revival strengthens the foundation for a renewed American republic. A people grounded in Judeo-Christian principles is better equipped to defend liberty and self-governance.

Parents who raised their children with faith are being encouraged by these results. Their prayers and persistence are bearing fruit despite cultural headwinds.

Christian universities and classical Christian schools are also seeing rising enrollment as families seek alternatives to failing public education systems steeped in woke indoctrination.

The data should silence those who claimed conservatism and traditional faith were relics of the past. Gen Z is proving that timeless truths still resonate with young hearts.

As Gen Z steps into adulthood and the workforce, their increased faith will influence marriages, parenting, workplaces, and eventually politics. The long-term impact could be profound.

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This spiritual awakening offers a powerful counter to the despair, anxiety, and nihilism plaguing many young Americans. Church provides community, purpose, and hope that no government program can match.

Conservative commentators have highlighted this trend as one of the most underreported positive stories in America today. Legacy media prefers narratives of decline over stories of renewal.

The Barna research should motivate churches to double down on biblical teaching and authentic discipleship. Young people are hungry for truth, not entertainment or political correctness.

America’s best days may still lie ahead if this generational return to faith continues and deepens. A revival among the young carries the potential to transform the nation.

Patriots and people of faith have reason for optimism. While challenges remain, the sight of Gen Z filling churches is a beautiful reminder that America’s spiritual heart is still beating strong.

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Eric Trump announced on Friday, May 15, 2026, his intention to sue MS NOW, formerly MSNBC, and primetime host Jen Psaki for what he described as blatant lies about his motivations for accompanying his father, President Donald Trump, on the historic Beijing state visit.

The announcement came in a detailed X post responding to a Wednesday monologue Psaki aired on her program The Briefing, in which she strongly implied that Eric Trump’s presence alongside the president during one of the most significant diplomatic summits of the second term was motivated by personal financial interests connected to a fintech company exploring deals with Chinese chip manufacturers.

During a monologue on Wednesday, Psaki put a spotlight on the president’s adult son joining him despite him not having a government job and that supposedly he was firewalled by the administration to prevent potential conflicts of interest as he and his brother, Donald Trump Jr., have taken over the family business. Psaki said that Eric Trump sits on the board of ALT5 Sigma and pointed to him and his brother ringing the Nasdaq bell on behalf of the company.

“It certainly seems like Eric might be getting a little bit more than just quality time with his dad out of this China trip, doesn’t it?” Psaki said.

Eric Trump responded, X: “I intend to sue @jrpsaki and @MSNOWNews over the below clip. To be clear: Contrary to her monologue and blatant lies, I have NEVER been on the board of ALT5, not now, not ever. Any person with basic access to Google and willing to open a company’s annual report or proxy statements would know this. I have had zero involvement in any merger discussions involving any public entity I do not run or control. I have zero business interests in China. No properties, no investments, nothing! I joined this trip for one reason: as a loving son who adores my father and wouldn’t miss being by his side for this incredible moment.”

The specific factual claim at the center of the announced lawsuit is the board member characterization Psaki applied to Eric Trump’s relationship with ALT5 Sigma. Eric Trump was listed as a board observer and advisor for ALT5 Sigma Corp., a Las Vegas-based fintech company that rebranded as AI Financial Corp, but he was removed from the company’s site in April.

The board member versus board observer distinction is the legally and factually critical question on which any defamation case will hinge.

A board member is a voting director of a corporation with full fiduciary responsibility. A board observer is a non-voting participant who attends meetings without governance authority. Psaki stated on air that Eric Trump sits on the board.

Eric Trump’s position is that he was never a board member, that the board observer classification was itself a prior status he no longer holds, and that publicly available corporate filings would have confirmed this distinction to any journalist who consulted them before going on air.

US securities filings show that Eric was an observer on the board of the fintech company ALT5 Sigma, which has ties to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto business. ALT5 Sigma and the Chinese chipmaker Nano Labs announced they were evaluating the prospect of cooperating on artificial intelligence data centers and other AI ventures.

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The Nano Labs connection gives Psaki’s reporting its national security and conflict-of-interest dimension. Nano Labs is a Chinese chip company. ALT5 Sigma, with which Eric Trump had a documented association of some form, was exploring cooperative AI data center ventures with that Chinese firm. President Trump was simultaneously in Beijing negotiating one of the most consequential US-China summits in years.

Psaki did not back down on Friday when Eric Trump’s lawsuit announcement was made public. She acknowledged the president’s son’s role with ALT5 has been complicated but presented evidence to support her original points. She said, “Eric took issue with us describing him as a member of the board of that AI company. And in his tweet today, Eric says he has never been on the board of Alt Five, not now, not ever, which is a little confusing, considering that this is how he was introduced at the NASDAQ just last summer when Alt Five rang the opening bell.”

The Nasdaq footage that Psaki aired on Friday is one of the most visually compelling pieces of evidence supporting her broader reporting and complicates the defamation case significantly. Eric Trump was publicly introduced at a Nasdaq opening bell ceremony as a board member of ALT5 Sigma, with that introduction made by the company’s own leadership. His subsequent reclassification in corporate filings to observer and later removal from the company’s website entirely create a timeline whose specific sequence will be central to any litigation.

Eric Trump also said he was visiting the Great Wall of China with his wife, Lara, during the bilateral talks between President Trump and Xi Jinping. That detail directly supports his characterization of the trip as personal and familial rather than business-motivated.

If he were sightseeing with his wife at the Great Wall while his father was in formal meetings, his presence in Beijing would not be evidence of participation in the diplomatic process.

The comparison between the treatment of Eric Trump’s presence and the treatment of other private citizens who accompanied the President to Beijing is a legitimate double-standard argument that his defenders have advanced consistently. Elon Musk’s Tesla has major manufacturing operations in China. Tim Cook’s Apple depends heavily on Chinese supply chains.

Both men traveled with the President. Neither generated the same conflict-of-interest framing that Psaki applied to Eric Trump, whose stated Chinese business interests are zero.

MS NOW had no comment on the lawsuit announcement. The network’s silence is consistent with standard legal practice when litigation has been announced. Publicly engaging with specific factual disputes after a lawsuit announcement creates a documented record that opposing counsel can use in discovery and at trial.

The Trump family pattern of litigation against media organizations provides important context for evaluating the seriousness and likely trajectory of Eric Trump’s announced suit. Prior high-profile settlements and ongoing litigation suggest these legal threats are not always purely rhetorical and can result in significant financial consequences.

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The defamation standard for public figures is extraordinarily demanding and requires proof that the defendant made the allegedly false statement with actual malice, meaning knowledge that it was false or reckless disregard for its truth or falsity.

Eric Trump’s case will need to establish not just that the board member characterization was technically inaccurate but that Psaki and MSNOW knew it was inaccurate or recklessly disregarded readily available documentary evidence before broadcasting the claim.

The broader conflict of interest question that Psaki raised about a president’s adult son traveling on a presidential state visit while business connections to the host country exist will not be resolved by a defamation lawsuit, regardless of the outcome. The Trump administration’s position is that Eric Trump traveled in a personal capacity, that the firewall between the family business and the White House is adequate, and that his presence alongside his father was a family matter rather than a business one.

Psaki’s position is that the combination of his business associations and concurrent Chinese business pursuits creates a legitimate conflict-of-interest concern worth public scrutiny.

Eric Trump was clear about what motivated his trip to Beijing. He says he was there as a son. He says he was at the Great Wall with his wife, not in the bilateral meetings.

He says he has no Chinese investments, properties, or business interests. The lawsuit he has announced will test whether the media organization and host who implied otherwise can defend their characterization in court.

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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared on Fox News Sunday Morning Futures on May 17, 2026, and delivered one of the most consequential statements by a sitting Department of Justice official on the question of 2020 election integrity that the American public has yet received, telling host Maria Bartiromo directly that there is a ton of evidence that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, confirming that multiple active criminal investigations are underway in Arizona and in Fulton County, Georgia, and revealing that the DOJ is issuing hundreds of subpoenas and interviewing hundreds of witnesses in the Southern District of Florida investigation into the broader deep-state conspiracy against President Trump.

Blanche’s full statement on the 2020 election was specific and unambiguous: “There’s a ton of evidence that the election was rigged.

That’s not something the DOJ needs to tell you about. There’s been evidence about that for many, many years. What I can tell you is that we have multiple investigations going on in Arizona and in Fulton County Georgia, and that’s exactly what we’re looking at.

By the way, this is very difficult because they’re very good. They’re very good at hiding misconduct and hiding what they’re doing. And so that’s why we’re very focused on finding out whether the right people voted, whether they were supposed to vote, or if there was one cast per voter.”

The confirmation of active criminal investigations in Arizona and Fulton County, Georgia, is the most operationally significant element of Blanche’s Sunday morning remarks. Both of those jurisdictions have been at the center of election integrity concerns since the 2020 election.

Maricopa County, Arizona, was the subject of the Arizona Senate’s forensic audit that documented numerous irregularities in ballot handling, chain of custody, and counting processes.

Fulton County, Georgia, produced the documentary evidence of video footage showing ballot handling after election observers were removed, a ballotting pattern that raised significant concerns among Republican observers and investigators.

Blanche was responding to comments made by White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, who said at an event last week that Trump actually won many of the states he lost in his 2020 defeat to President Joe Biden. It’s not the first time a DOJ official has claimed on Bartiromo’s show that there is imminent proof of a rigged 2020 election. FBI Director Kash Patel told Bartiromo on April 19 that not only was the evidence readily available, but also arrests would come as soon as that week.

White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’s pre-summit statement that Trump actually won certain states he was declared to have lost in 2020 is the political context that made Blanche’s subsequent Fox News remarks most consequential. Wiles is not a backbench commentator.

She is the most senior White House staff official, a woman with direct daily access to the president, and her statement represents the most senior-level White House signal yet that the administration believes the 2020 results in at least some states were fraudulently determined.

Blanche’s confirmation of multiple active DOJ investigations in the immediate aftermath of her statement is not a coincidence in timing.

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Blanche also confirmed the scope of the Southern District of Florida Russia hoax investigation: “As has been publicly reported, the Southern District of Florida has an open criminal investigation. That involves hundreds of subpoenas. It involves hundreds of witnesses.

And so, as far as timing, when we can expect it, we are working hard, and we are working efficiently, but we are going to do it right.” Hundreds of subpoenas and hundreds of witnesses represent one of the largest federal criminal investigation efforts in recent American history.

The fact that the Southern District of Florida investigation, which encompasses the Russia hoax and related deep state actions against Trump spanning a decade, has reached the scale of hundreds of subpoenas signals that it is well past the preliminary inquiry stage and has entered the intensive evidence-gathering phase that precedes charging decisions.

Blanche offered a preview of what Americans should expect when the investigations conclude: “We’re finding out some incredibly troubling things, and at some point, at the right time, that will be made public, and the American people will see exactly what happened to this administration and President Trump over the past decade.”

That statement, “the American people will see exactly what happened,” is the clearest commitment yet from the acting attorney general that the investigations are producing findings that will be made public and that those findings will be significant.

The specific language about focusing on whether the right people voted and whether there was one vote cast per voter describes the operational focus of the election integrity investigations in concrete terms. Those questions correspond to the two most documented categories of 2020 election concern: noncitizen voting and double voting.

The DOJ’s charging this month of four New Jersey noncitizens who voted illegally in the 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections demonstrated that noncitizen voting in federal elections is real and prosecutable. The Arizona and Fulton County investigations appear to be pursuing evidence of broader and more coordinated misconduct on a scale that the four New Jersey cases represent individually.

Blanche acknowledged the difficulty of the investigation in terms that explain the timeline: “It takes a lot of work to uncover what happened in 2020.

It takes a lot of old, good old-fashioned law enforcement police work, which is what we’re doing, and we have great prosecutors working on it as well, and I assure the American people that as soon as we have something to say for it, whether it’s charges, whether it’s a report, or whether it’s the results of an investigation, the American people will learn about what we uncovered.”

The admission that the outcome might be a report rather than criminal charges, while disappointing to those who have been expecting prosecution, reflects the realistic acknowledgment that building a criminal case for election fraud sufficient to overcome the reasonable doubt standard in a jury trial is extraordinarily difficult even when the underlying irregularities are documented.

A comprehensive DOJ report on 2020 election irregularities, even without criminal charges, would represent a significant accountability document that would permanently alter the historical record of the election.

Blanche did not provide a timeline for when the investigations’ conclusions would be made public. When Bartiromo pressed him on whether there would be a definitive answer on whether the 2020 election was stolen, he was honest about the limits of his commitment.

“I’m not going to promise there’s going to be a definitive answer,” Blanche said. “That wouldn’t be fair to you or anybody else, but we are looking at it, and we’re hoping to get one.”

That measured statement reflects the genuine complexity of proving election fraud at the scale that would have altered a presidential outcome, even where the evidence of specific irregular acts is substantial.

The specific difficulty Blanche described, that the people responsible for hiding misconduct are very good at hiding it, is the operational challenge that has characterized every serious investigation into alleged 2020 election irregularities.

Electronic systems can be cleared, logs can be altered, chain of custody records can be fabricated after the fact, and witnesses who participated in irregular conduct have every reason to deny it.

The forensic reconstruction of what happened requires precisely the kind of extensive subpoena and witness interview process that the Southern District of Florida investigation has been conducting at the scale of hundreds of each.

Republican reaction to Blanche’s Sunday morning remarks was broadly celebratory, with conservative media treating the acting attorney general’s confirmation of active investigations and his characterization of the evidence as a ton as vindication of the claims that Trump and his supporters have been making since Election Night 2020. The statement was described as a major confirmation of longstanding election integrity concerns.

The democratic reaction was predictably dismissive. Left-leaning outlets characterized Blanche’s statements as unsupported assertions of claims that courts have repeatedly rejected, pointing to the more than 60 court cases in which Trump’s 2020 election challenges failed.

The distinction between what those cases decided, which was primarily procedural questions about standing and timing rather than full evidentiary adjudication of the underlying fraud claims, and what Blanche is now describing as active criminal investigations with hundreds of subpoenas and witnesses, is one that mainstream media coverage of the Sunday appearance largely glossed over.

The courts that dismissed 2020 election challenges largely did so on grounds of standing, timing, and the procedural posture of post-election litigation rather than conducting full merits hearings on the evidence of fraud.

A DOJ criminal investigation that serves hundreds of subpoenas, interviews hundreds of witnesses, and examines the underlying conduct through the full investigative toolkit available to federal law enforcement is a categorically different process than emergency post-election litigation in federal district courts.

The outcomes of one process do not determine the findings of the other.

Blanche’s statement was specific about the geographic focus of the election investigations: Arizona and Fulton County, Georgia. Both jurisdictions were central to the disputed 2020 results. Arizona was decided by approximately 10,000 votes. Georgia was decided by fewer than 12,000 votes.

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Together they represented the narrowest margins in the states whose outcomes determined the 2020 Electoral College result. If the investigations in those jurisdictions produce criminal referrals, indictments, or a comprehensive report documenting specific irregular conduct at sufficient scale, the historical and political significance of that outcome would be extraordinary.

The American people have waited six years for the full story of what happened in the 2020 presidential election.

The acting attorney general of the United States said on Sunday that his department has a ton of evidence that the election was rigged, that multiple active criminal investigations are examining that evidence, that the work is difficult because the people responsible are very good at hiding what they did, and that the American people will learn what the DOJ has uncovered when the investigations conclude.

That is the most direct official commitment on the 2020 election accountability question that any senior DOJ official has made publicly, and it was made on Sunday morning, on the record, on national television.

The investigations are underway. The subpoenas are out. The witnesses are being interviewed.

The evidence, according to the acting attorney general, is substantial. Whether the outcome is charges, a report, or specific factual findings about what happened in Arizona and Fulton County, the American people have been promised they will see it.

Todd Blanche said so on May 17, 2026. That promise is now part of the permanent public record of the Trump administration’s accountability effort.

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Aimee Bock, the convicted founder of the Minnesota nonprofit Feeding Our Future and the woman at the center of the largest pandemic-era fraud case in American history, sat in Sherburne County Jail and told the New York Post in a video call that Representative Ilhan Omar knew about the $250 million COVID meal fraud scheme that federal prosecutors say she led, specifically alleging that Omar’s office was not merely a passive legislative actor but an active participant in maintaining the regulatory environment that made the fraud possible.

The Minnesota mastermind of the state’s massive COVID meal fraud claims, Squad Rep. Ilhan Omar was in on the $250 million scam.

Bock said the government used her as a scapegoat and believes it was aware of the rampant fraud. “I struggle to believe that she wouldn’t have known,” Bock said of Omar.

Bock, founder of nonprofit Feeding Our Future, was convicted in March 2025 of conspiracy, bribery, and wire fraud for allegedly helping restaurant owners file fake or inflated claims during the pandemic to steal millions in child nutrition funds from the government. Prosecutors are seeking a 100-year sentence. Her sentencing before US District Judge Nancy Brasel is scheduled for May 31, 2026.

The legislative dimension of the accusation is the most documented and the least disputable element of Bock’s claims. Omar was instrumental in loosening the laws that set the stage for the scheme, first by introducing the MEALS Act to Congress in March 2020, which allowed the US Department of Agriculture to issue waivers of school-meal requirements during the pandemic.

The waivers dramatically eased oversight of the federal programs by allowing restaurants to participate without any of the usual site inspections. Omar would personally step in whenever those waivers ran out, allowing the rampant fraud to continue, Bock alleged.

The MEALS Act is on the congressional record. The USDA waivers it enabled are documented. The effect of those waivers, eliminating the site inspection requirement that would have caught operators billing for meals they never provided, is the procedural foundation of the entire scheme.

Whether Omar introduced those waivers in good faith as pandemic emergency food assistance legislation or with awareness that they were creating conditions for fraud is the question that Bock’s allegations raise and that Omar’s consistent refusal to cooperate with investigators has not resolved.

Bock described multiple instances of contact between Feeding Our Future and Omar’s office. According to Bock, the congresswoman’s staff fielded requests for assistance with US Department of Agriculture programs.

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She also claimed that Omar personally helped maintain the program’s flexibility, stating that waivers periodically lapsed and that Omar’s involvement addressed gaps in coverage.

“There had been a couple times early on that there were some gaps, a waiver would be set to expire on maybe the 15th of the month,” Bock told the Post.

The gaps-in-coverage allegation is the most specific and most serious claim in the entire jailhouse interview. If true, it describes a congressional office that was not merely a passive legislative actor who introduced a bill that was subsequently exploited by fraudsters but an active participant in ensuring the continuation of the specific regulatory environment that the fraud operators depended on.

Every time a waiver was about to expire and restore the oversight standards that would have detected the scheme, Bock alleges, Omar’s involvement kept it going.

Court exhibits from Bock’s trial, which resurfaced earlier this month, show Omar’s name appearing at least six times in emails and text messages. One February 5, 2021, email chain carried the subject line “Help with USDA food program,” and another exchange between Bock and a Feeding Our Future employee was labeled “Ilhan’s Office.”

A text string between Bock and Omar was also recovered during a raid of Bock’s home. The contents of those communications remain sealed as of this report.

The sealed communications are the most significant undisclosed element of the entire accountability story. A text message exchange recovered in a federal raid of the fraud conviction’s principal’s home, involving a sitting congresswoman whose office the convicted mastermind says knew about the scheme, with contents that remain sealed by court order, is a document that the House Oversight Committee and the American public have a legitimate interest in.

The sealing of those specific communications while the balance of the trial record has been made public raises questions about what they contain that have not been answered.

Omar filmed a video at Safari restaurant, the biggest fraudster, promoting the program. Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis became one of the most documented fraudulent operators in the entire case, with prosecutors establishing it submitted claims for millions of dollars in meals never prepared or served.

Video footage of Omar promoting the program at that specific location is part of the documented record. The timing and content of that video promotion, in relation to what was known or knowable about the fraud at that restaurant, is a question the House Oversight Committee has been pressing for months without receiving a satisfactory answer.

Minnesota’s state Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee recently asked the US House Oversight Committee to subpoena Omar over her refusal to turn over her communications with fraudsters. That subpoena request is the most concrete institutional expression of what the documentary trail has produced.

A bipartisan state-level oversight committee concluded that Omar’s communications with the fraud network are relevant to the investigation and that voluntary production cannot be relied upon. The subpoena request followed.

Omar’s office characterized Bock as a convicted criminal attempting to deflect from her own crimes. That characterization is accurate as far as it goes.

Bock is a convicted felon awaiting a sentencing hearing where prosecutors are seeking a 100-year sentence. She has significant motivation to implicate others, particularly a high-profile political figure, in ways that might support her public narrative of being a government scapegoat or potentially influence her sentencing outcome.

That caveat is real and must be part of any honest assessment of the weight to give Bock’s specific claims about Omar’s knowledge.

The caveat does not explain the documentary evidence that exists independent of Bock’s account. Omar’s name appearing in six separate email chains from the trial record is not Bock’s allegation.

It is established fact from trial exhibits. The email subject line “Ilhan’s Office” is not Bock’s characterization. It is a document recovered in the federal investigation.

The sealed text message exchange is not Bock’s description of events. It is a communication recovered in a federal raid whose contents the court has determined warrant protection pending further proceedings. Those documents exist regardless of how much weight one assigns to the jailhouse interview of a convicted felon.

The Feeding Our Future case has already produced 92 people charged in connection with federally funded program fraud in Minnesota, with 67 convictions.

The scheme exploited programs designed to feed children during school closures during a national emergency. The people who ran it received millions of dollars for meals they never provided to children who went without.

The political and legislative infrastructure that created and maintained the regulatory environment in which it operated is the accountability question that the prosecutions alone have not fully answered.

The sealed text message exchange, the email chains labeled with the congresswoman’s office name, the video at the largest fraudulent operator, the allegations about waiver extension advocacy, the six appearances of her name in trial exhibits, and now a jailhouse interview from the convicted scheme leader all collectively describe a congressional office whose relationship with the Feeding Our Future network was substantially more than incidental.

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Whether that relationship constitutes criminal complicity, willful blindness, or something else entirely is a question that the evidence currently available cannot definitively answer and that the sealed documents may be most relevant to resolving.

Omar has represented Minnesota’s fifth congressional district since 2019. She built her public brand on advocacy for her constituents, many of whom live in the community most directly harmed by a scheme that took money designated to feed their children. The children whose meals were billed for and never provided lived in her district.

The fraudsters who looted the programs that were supposed to serve those children operated within her community.

The question of what she knew and when she knew it is not an abstract accountability exercise. It is a question about the welfare of the most vulnerable members of the constituency she was elected to represent.

The sentencing of Aimee Bock is scheduled for May 31. Whatever sentence Judge Brasel imposes will be the most significant single accountability action in the Feeding Our Future prosecution.

The sealed documents may or may not become part of the public record through subsequent legal proceedings. The House Oversight Committee subpoena request for Omar’s communications is pending.

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The United States Senate voted unanimously Thursday, May 14, 2026, to adopt a resolution that will withhold senators’ pay during any government shutdown that results from congressional failure to pass appropriations legislation before funding deadlines, creating a direct financial consequence for lawmakers who have spent the past year presiding over two of the longest and most damaging government shutdowns in American history while continuing to collect their salaries throughout.

The measure, which was approved by a voice vote, was introduced by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. It only applies to members of the Senate and does not require House approval or the president’s signature. Senators’ pay will be withheld when any part of the government is shut down amid congressional funding disputes.

Their paychecks will be released “as soon as practicable after the date on which the Government shutdown ends,” according to the resolution. The measure in the Senate was introduced by Republican John Kennedy and advanced in a unanimous 99-0 vote on Wednesday.

“Take your brain with you, because this is about shared sacrifice. This is about putting our money where our mouth is,” Sen. Kennedy said on the Senate floor ahead of Wednesday’s vote. The 99-0 procedural advancement vote represents one of the most lopsided bipartisan votes the Senate has recorded on any legislation in recent years.

The shutdown issue has generated genuine shame across party lines after the record-breaking impasses of the past twelve months. Led by GOP Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, the resolution directs the secretary of the Senate to withhold pay from senators during a lapse in appropriations for one or more federal agencies or departments.

The payments would be released after the shutdown comes to an end. Kennedy called it “shared sacrifice,” pointing to how federal employees generally go without pay during a shutdown.

Last year, the government was shut down for 43 days as Democrats in Congress protested the expiration of healthcare subsidies. Kennedy’s resolution comes after federal workers faced a historic 43-day government shutdown late last year caused by a deadlock between parties over Affordable Care Act subsidies.

During that time, approximately 670,000 federal workers were furloughed, 60,000 workers outside the federal government lost their jobs and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients lost out on benefits all while members of Congress continued to receive their salaries.

The 43-day shutdown was followed almost immediately by a second, partially overlapping funding crisis. Kennedy first introduced the resolution during last fall’s then-record 43-day full government shutdown.

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The government partially shut down again for 76 days earlier this year over a funding impasse between congressional Republicans and Democrats involving the Department of Homeland Security. The 76-day DHS shutdown, which ended just weeks before this resolution was adopted, became the longest partial agency shutdown in American history.

The Secret Service, the TSA, the Coast Guard, and FEMA operated without routine appropriations during that period. Kennedy said on the Senate floor: “We ought to hide our heads in a bag. It’s got to stop. Shutting down government, it should not be our default solution to our refusal to work out our issues and our differences.”

Kennedy’s floor statement acknowledges the institutional failure that the resolution is designed to address. The Senate has been using government shutdowns as a default negotiating mechanism at the expense of federal workers, contractors, and citizens who depend on government services.

Senators continued to receive their $174,000 annual salaries throughout each shutdown. The resolution ends that arrangement for Senate members.

The resolution only applies to members of the Senate and does not need to be approved by the House or signed by President Trump. It would take effect after the midterm election, so it would not apply to a possible government shutdown this fall.

Republicans think another shutdown is likely because of the deep animosity between Trump and Democratic senators. The Senate voted 99-0 on the motion to end debate on proceeding to the resolution, signaling overwhelming support.

The limitation to Senate members only reflects constitutional constraints on what a Senate-only resolution can accomplish. It also reflects the practical reality that getting House buy-in on identical legislation has historically been difficult.

Speaker Mike Johnson has not indicated whether the House will adopt a similar measure applied to its own members’ salaries in the future. “We’ll have to find out,” he previously told reporters. “I mean, the House has some ideas on that as well, so we’ll see what consensus we can build on.”

The bipartisan support for the measure comes at a time when federal closures have become longer and more frequent, frustrating lawmakers who say there should be punishment when Congress fails at its most basic legislative duty.

Under the resolution, senators’ pay would be withheld by the secretary of the Senate whenever a government shutdown affects one or more agencies, then released once funding is restored. It will take effect the day after the November election.

The bipartisan nature of the vote deserves emphasis because genuine bipartisan unanimity in the current Senate is extraordinarily rare. Senate Democrats and Republicans have disagreed on virtually every major piece of legislation over the past eighteen months.

Senators approved the resolution by voice vote, despite some questions as to whether it was constitutional. The Constitution only states that lawmakers are to be paid from the Treasury, with no exceptions mentioned.

Kennedy has maintained the resolution is not unconstitutional and did not expect any challenges from his colleagues on those grounds. The constitutional debate centers on whether financial pressure on lawmakers creates concerns about legislative independence.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer publicly supported the measure ahead of the vote. “Yes, I’m going to vote for it, and I think it has a lot of support,” the New York Democrat said Wednesday.

Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., said she has donated her paycheck during past shutdowns, including last fall to causes involving healthcare and Meals on Wheels. “I’ve always believed no Member of Congress should be paid if the government is shut down,” she wrote on X.

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Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., also backed the measure, posting: “No member of Congress should receive a dime while hardworking Americans wonder how they’ll afford to live their lives because of government dysfunction.”

The secretary of the Senate will administer the withholding process. The withheld pay will be held rather than permanently forfeited, meaning senators will receive the money once the shutdown ends.

Senators earn $174,000 per year, or approximately $14,500 per month. A 43-day shutdown would have meant roughly $20,400 in withheld pay, while a 76-day shutdown would have meant approximately $35,600.

Kennedy previously introduced stronger legislation that would have permanently withheld pay and applied to both the Senate and House, but those proposals failed to gain traction. The resolution that passed is a narrower version focused on temporary withholding.

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