After the unprovoked bombing of Iran over the weekend by the United States—strikes that included the unlawful assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei—the call for US President Donald Trump to be impeached and removed from office has grown as the straightest path to hold the US leader to account for the attacks which policy and human rights experts have condemned as a serious war crime.

With a regional war in the Middle East that was already boiling from Gaza to Lebanon and from Syria to Yemen now exploding in the wake of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, Globe and Mail columnist Debra Thompson on Sunday called Trump “the most dangerous man on the planet.”

“Rather than ending wars,” Thompson notes, “Trump has initiated military action eight times, carrying out attacks in seven countries (Syria, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, and Venezuela) in 2025.” Such a pattern of violence and warmongering should make clear that failure to restrain Trump has only emboldened him.

“The recurring danger in this latest presidential aggression is that there are no guardrails, no constraints, and no post-hoc justification,” writes Thomson, “other than that Mr. Trump is the President of the United States and can do whatever he wants.”

But American presidents cannot simply do whatever they want. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll out Sunday, less than 25% support the president’s aggression against Iran. In the first wave of the US military attack, an Iranian school for girls was bombed, killing over 108 civilians, mostly children.

While some congressional lawmakers are pushing for a vote this week on a War Powers Resolution to curtail US military operations against Iran, others are demanding more robust action from Congress to bring Trump’s war-making to an end.

“Under Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, as well as to raise and support armies, provide and maintain a navy, and fund and regulate the military,” declared novelist and political activists Stephen King on Saturday. “Impeach the SOB.”

Mike Hersh and Alan Minsky, respectively the communications director and executive director of the Progressive Democrats of America, argued in a Sunday op-ed for Common Dreams that “Trump’s illegal, unconstitutional war on Iran is not only a moral and humanitarian disaster, but also a profound constitutional crisis.”

According to Hersh and Minsky:

Trump’s illegal war on Iran and the rule of law establish an intolerable pattern of egregious abuses of power, directly threatening our constitutional order, our safety, and our way of life. These intertwined crises cry out for an immediate, decisive response by the Congress and the US public. Therefore, PDA demands that all members of Congress, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, uphold their oath of office to defend our constitutional republic. The Constitution offers one and only one remedy when President a repeatedly breaks the law and arrogantly refuses to abide by the limits on the power clearly laid out in the Constitution. That remedy is impeachment, followed by removal from office.

Matt Duss, executive vice president for the Center for International Policy, said that US lawmakers, as well as the American people they represent, “must also be ready to hold the president and his administration accountable for this breach of US and international law.”

“The failure to hold past presidents liable for war crimes and related violations of our own laws has helped lead to this dangerous moment, with a seemingly unrestrained president endangering millions of lives with impunity,” warned Duss. “The forever wars and the imperial presidency must finally come to an end.”

Senior Trump administration officials attempted during a briefing with reporters on Saturday to make their case for the joint US-Israeli military assault on Iran that has so far killed hundreds and plunged the Middle East into chaos.

According to experts who listened to the briefing, which was conducted on background, the justification for war was incredibly weak. Daryl Kimball, president of the Arms Control Association, told Laura Rozen of the Diplomatic newsletter that the administration’s argument was “the flimsiest excuse for initiating a major attack on another country without congressional authorization, in violation of the UN Charter, in many decades.”

During his early Saturday remarks announcing the attacks, President Donald Trump claimed that “imminent threats from the Iranian regime” against “the American people” drove him to act. But Kimball said that administration officials “provided absolutely no evidence” to back that assertion during the briefing.

“What they posed as the threat they were trying to preempt—an attack by Iran against US forces—is so extremely implausible, it is also laughable,” said Kimball.

Following the start of Saturday’s assault, which Trump explicitly characterized as a war aimed at overthrowing the Iranian government, unnamed administration officials began leaking the claim that Trump feared an Iranian attack on the massive US military buildup in the Middle East, prompting him to greenlight the bombing campaign in coordination with Israel and with a nudge from Saudi Arabia.

Kimball, in a social media post, took members of the US media to task for echoing the administration’s narrative. “Reporters need to do more than stenography,” he wrote in response to Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman.

“The American people were lied to about Iraq. The American people are being lied to again today—and once again, it is ordinary people who will pay the price.”

Trump and top administration officials also repeated the longstanding claim from US warhawks that Iran is bent on developing a nuclear weapon, something Iranian leaders have publicly denied—including during recent diplomatic talks. Neither US intelligence assessments nor international nuclear watchdogs have produced evidence indicating that Iran is moving rapidly in the direction of nukes, as claimed by the administration.

Rozen noted that some remarks from administration officials during Saturday’s briefing “suggested Trump’s negotiators”—a team that included Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—“may not have had the expertise or experience to understand the Iranian proposal to curb its nuclear program.” Rozen reported that one administration official kept misstating the acronym for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog.

Trump administration officials, according to Rozen, seemed astonished that Iranian negotiators would not accept the US offer to provide free nuclear fuel “forever” for Iran’s peaceful energy development, viewing the rejection as a suspicious indication that Iran was opposed to a diplomatic resolution—even though, according to Oman’s foreign minister, Iran had already made concessions that went well beyond the terms of the 2015 nuclear accord that Trump abandoned during his first stint in the White House.

Experts said it should be obvious—particularly given Trump’s decision to ditch the previous nuclear accord—why Iran would not trust the US to stick by such a commitment.

The administration’s inability to provide a coherent justification for war tracks with the rapidly shifting narrative preceding Saturday’s strikes—an indication, according to some observers, that Trump had made the decision to attack Iran even in the face of diplomatic progress and left officials to try to cobble together a rationale after the fact.

In a lengthy social media post, Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted war was necessary because Iran “refused to make a deal” and because the Iranian government “has targeted and killed Americans,” hardly the claim of an imminent threat push by the president and other administration officials.

Brian Finucane, a senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, noted in response that the Trump administration has “sidelined anyone who could articulate... a coherent argument, partly because expertise is deep state and woke and partly because they just don’t care.”

The result is another potentially catastrophic war that runs roughshod over US and international law, puts countless civilians at risk, and threatens to spark a region-wide conflict.

“President Trump, along with his right-wing extremist Israeli ally Benjamin Netanyahu, has begun an illegal, premeditated, and unconstitutional war,” US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement on Saturday. “Tragically, Trump is gambling with American lives and treasure to fulfill Netanyahu’s decades-long ambition of dragging the United States into armed conflict with Iran.”

“The American people were lied to about Vietnam. The American people were lied to about Iraq,” Sanders added. “The American people are being lied to again today—and once again, it is ordinary people who will pay the price.”

Bettors on the prediction platform Polymarket made a killing with suspiciously timed wagers that the United States would attack Iran by February 28, the day President Donald Trump announced a bombing campaign against the Middle East nation.

Bloomberg reported that six accounts on Polymarket, all newly created this month, “made around $1 million in profit” by betting on the timing of the US attack on Iran. The accounts, according to Bloomberg, “had only ever placed bets on when US strikes might occur,” and “some of their shares were purchased, in some cases at roughly a dime apiece, hours before the first explosions were reported in Tehran.”

One account with the name Magamyman raked in over $515,000 by betting roughly $87,000 that the “US strikes Iran by February 28, 2026.”

The lucrative bets quickly drew scrutiny from lawmakers. US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on social media that “it’s insane this is legal.”

“People around Trump are profiting off war and death,” Murphy alleged. “I’m introducing legislation ASAP to ban this.”

Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) wrote that “prediction markets cannot be a vehicle for profiting off advance knowledge of military action” and demanded “answers, transparency, and oversight.”

“Reminder that Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket’s advisory board and his firm invested double-digit millions into the platform last year,” Levin wrote, referring to the president’s eldest son. “The [Justice Department] and [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] both had active investigations into Polymarket that were dropped after Trump took office.”

There’s no concrete evidence that Trump administration officials or staffers were behind the hugely profitable bets, but the wagers heightened concerns about the possibility of insider trading using increasingly popular prediction market platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi. Last month, bettors used Polymarket to make big profits on suspiciously timed wagers on when the US would oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Polymarket currently allows users to bet on when Iran will have a new supreme leader, when the US and Iran will reach a ceasefire agreement, and when the US will invade Iran.

The celebrity news tabloid TMZ reported Saturday that “a group at a Washington, DC restaurant was talking openly in the bar area Friday afternoon about a national secret that was about to literally explode hours later—the bombing of Iran.”

As journalist David Bernstein noted, that—if true—leaves open the possibility that “these ‘insider’ bets have been placed by any rich person with good ears in DC.”

“Not to mention that for all we know these administration clowns were probably gossiping about it on a text chain with half a dozen people they accidentally invited,” Bernstein added. “This is hardly the locked lips brigade we’re dealing with.”

President Donald Trump raised eyebrows and angst among democracy defenders Friday for saying he deserves an unconstitutional third term in office, remarks that came a day after reporting that right-wing activists are drafting an executive order that could empower him to ban mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“Maybe we do one more term. Should we do one more?” the 79-year-old Republican president asked attendees of an event at the Port of Corpus Christi in Texas, to roaring applause. “Do one more term. Well, we are entitled to it.”During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump rehashed his thoroughly debunked claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election for former President Joe Biden, saying this “should be my third term.”

A third term would require a constitutional amendment, as the 22nd Amendment restricts US presidents to two terms in office.

Extensions of presidential terms or abolition of limits are hallmarks of dictators and backsliding leaders of erstwhile democracies. After Chinese President Xi Jinping lifted constitutional term limits in 2018, Trump marveled, “He’s great,” adding, “He’s now president for life.”

Trump has made cryptic allusions to a third term in office on multiple occasions.

While many Trump supporters believe he should also be president for life, his allies in actual positions of power—including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and political strategist and convicted fraudster Steve Bannon, whom Trump granted clemency—have backed a third term for his administration.

A constitutional amendment enabling a third Trump term is not under any consideration and is all but impossible by the 2028 election. So Trump and his allies are working on other ways for the president to remain in office, focusing heavily on voter suppression. The Washington Post reported Thursday that a group of right-wing activists is writing a draft decree that would give the president “extraordinary power over voting.” On Friday, Democracy Docket published an April 2025 version of the draft order provided by a Trump ally, which the outlet described as “riddled with errors.”

According to the Post, the draft executive order would cite the pretext of alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that there was no such interference.

MS NOW national security contributor Marc Polymeropoulos called the draft order “bat---- authoritarianism.”

A January 2026 Gallup poll showed that 89% of all Americans expect high levels of political conflict this year, as the country heads toward one of its most decisive midterm elections ever.

Gallup, however, was stating the obvious. It is a surprise that not all Americans feel this way, judging by the coarse, often outright racist discourse currently being normalized by top American officials. Some call this new rhetoric the “language of humiliation,” where officials refer to entire social and racial groups as “vermin,” “garbage,” or “invaders.”]

The aim of this language is not simply to insult, but to feed the "Rage Bait Cycle“—tellingly, Oxford’s 2025 Word of the Year: A high-ranking official attacks a whole community or ”the other side“; waits for a response; escalates the attacks; and then presents himself as a protector of traditions, values, and America itself. This does more than simply ”hollow out“ democracy, as suggested in a Human Rights Watch report last January; it prepares the country for “affective polarization,” where people no longer just disagree on political matters, but actively dislike each other for who they are and what they supposedly represent.

How else can we explain the statements of US President Donald Trump, who declared last December: “Somalia... is barely a country... Their country stinks and we don’t want them in our country... We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.” This is not simply an angry president, but an overreaching political discourse supported by millions of Americans who continue to see Trump as their defender and savior.

We are entering a state of regime cleavage—a political struggle no longer concerned with winning elections, but one where dominant groups fundamentally disagree on the very definition of what constitutes a nation.

This polarization reached a fever pitch at the 2026 Super Bowl, where the halftime selection of Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny ignited a firestorm over national identity. While millions celebrated the performance, Trump and conservative commentators launched a boycott, labeling the Spanish-language show “not American enough” and inappropriate. The rhetoric escalated further when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem suggested Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents would be “all over” the event, effectively ostracizing countless people from their right to belong to a distinct culture within American society.

The weaponization of culture and language was not limited to the stage; it split American viewers into two distinct camps: those who watched the official performance and those who turned to an “All-American” alternative broadcast hosted by Turning Point USA featuring Kid Rock. This “countering” is the very essence of the American conflict, which many have rightly predicted will eventually reach a breaking point akin to civil war.

That conclusion seems inevitable as the culture war couples with three alarming trends: identity dehumanization; partisan mirroring—the view that the other side is an existential threat; and institutional conflict—where federal agencies are perceived as “lawless,” sitting congresswomen are labeled “garbage,” and dissenting views are branded as treasonous.

This takes us to the fundamental question of legitimacy. In a healthy democracy, all sides generally recognize the legitimacy of the system itself, regardless of internal squabbles. In the United States, this is no longer the case. We are entering a state of regime cleavage—a political struggle no longer concerned with winning elections, but one where dominant groups fundamentally disagree on the very definition of what constitutes a nation.

The current crisis is not a new phenomenon; it dates back to the historical tension between ‘assimilation“ within an American ”melting pot“ versus the ”multiculturalism“ often compared to a ”salad bowl.“ The melting pot principle, frequently promoted as a positive social ideal, effectively pressures immigrant communities and minorities to ”melt“ into a white-Christian-dominated social structure. In contrast, the salad bowl model allows minorities to feel very much American while maintaining their distinct languages, customs, and social priorities, thus without losing their unique identities.

While this debate persisted for decades as a highly intellectualized academic exercise, it has transformed into a daily, visceral conflict. The 2026 Super Bowl served as a stark manifestation of this deeper cultural friction. Several factors have pushed the United States to this precipice: a struggling economy, rising social inequality, and a rapidly closing demographic gap. Dominant social groups no longer feel “safe.” Although the perceived threat to their “way of life” is often framed as a cultural or social grievance, it is, in essence, a struggle over economic privilege and political dominance.

There is also a significant disparity in political focus. While the right—represented by the MAGA movement and TPUSA—possesses a clarity of vision and relative political cohesion, the “other side” remains shrouded in ambiguity. The Democratic institution, which purports to represent the grievances of all other marginalized groups, lacks the trust of younger Americans, particularly those belonging to Gen Z. According to a recent poll by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), trust in traditional political institutions among voters aged 18-25 has plummeted to historic lows, with over 65% expressing dissatisfaction with both major parties.

As the midterm elections approach, society is stretching its existing polarization to a new extreme. While the right clings to the hope of a savior making the country “great again,” the “left” is largely governed by the politics of counter demonization and reactive grievances—hardly a revolutionary approach to governance.

Regardless of the November results, much of the outcome is already predetermined: a wider social conflict in the US is inevitable. The breaking point is fast approaching.

Leaders at the Social Security Administration are reportedly instructing agency employees to provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement with information about in-person beneficiary appointments.

Wired reported Friday that the instructions were “recently communicated verbally to workers at certain SSA offices.” The outlet quoted an unnamed employee with direct knowledge of the orders who said that “if ICE comes in and asks if someone has an upcoming appointment, we will let them know the date and time.”

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Social Security benefits, though they do contribute tens of billions of dollars per year to the program through payroll taxes. Noncitizens can qualify for Social Security, but Wired noted that they are “required to appear in person to review continued eligibility of benefits.”

“Social Security numbers are issued to US citizens but also to foreign students and people legally allowed to live and work in the country,” the outlet observed. “In some cases, when a child or dependent is a citizen and the family member responsible for them is not, that person might need to accompany the child or dependent to an office visit.”

The revelation that SSA workers are being told to hand over appointment details to ICE came amid an ongoing congressional fight over proposed reforms to the immigration agency that has resulted in a funding lapse at the Department of Homeland Security, which has a data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration.

“You’re seeing SSA becoming an extension of Homeland Security,” Leland Dudek, the former acting commissioner for the Social Security Administration, told Wired.

SSA is currently led by Frank Bisignano, a former financial services CEO who backed the Elon Musk-led assault on government agencies via the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Indications that ICE has Social Security field offices in its crosshairs as part of the Trump administration’s large-scale, lawless mass deportation campaign sparked outrage. In a joint statement, Reps. John Larson (D-Conn.) and Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said that “under this administration, ICE has been transformed into Donald Trump’s secret police force—accountable to nobody.”

“They are killing Americans in our streets, sending masked agents to snatch mothers from their children, and illegally blocking members of Congress from even visiting their facilities,” Larson and Neal said Friday. “Today, we were informed that ICE is attempting to infiltrate the Social Security Administration too—using field offices to further round up and detain people, and scaring people out of getting the benefits they need.”

“It was bad enough that Donald Trump and Kristi Noem have already used Social Security as a means to get immigrants to ‘self-deport.’ We led the effort to stop them and passed legislation to prevent them from continuing that policy,” the Democrats added. “Now, Congress needs to act to end ICE’s reign of terror in our communities and block this cruel and inhumane plan.”

Members of Congress were given a chance to scour unredacted versions of the Department of Justice’s files on Jeffrey Epstein for the first time on Monday.

There are more than 3 million pages available for lawmakers to comb through following their release to the public with heavy redactions. Meanwhile, despite a law requiring all the files to be released in December, the DOJ is still sitting on another 3 million pages that have yet to be published.

Lawmakers have so far only scratched the surface of the information available. But what they’ve seen after just one day has even some of President Donald Trump’s biggest defenders reevaluating their dismissal of the Epstein scandal.

“Initially, my reaction to all this was, I don’t care, I don’t know what the big deal is,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) told independent journalist Pablo Manríquez on Monday. “But now I see what the big deal is and it was worth investigating. The members of Congress who were pushing this were not wrong!”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who have led the charge in Congress for the files to be released, said on Monday that six individuals who were “likely incriminated” in Epstein’s crimes had their identities blacked out by the DOJ in the files that were released publicly.

“In a couple of hours, we found six men whose names have been redacted, who are implicated in the way that the files are presented,” Massie told reporters outside the DOJ office where lawmakers viewed the files.

They did not initially specify the individuals’ names, but Massie said at least one was a US citizen and some were “high‑up” foreign officials.

Massie later revealed that one of the men on this list was Les Wexner, the ex-CEO of L Brands, which owns Victoria’s Secret. Wexner appears in the files thousands of times and was infamously one of Epstein’s most intimate financial clients.

After Massie questioned why Wexner’s name was blacked out, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced it had been unredacted and said the DOJ was “hiding nothing.” The other five names remained redacted as of Tuesday morning.

The FBI closed its investigation into Epstein in July, concluding that while the financier himself abused several underage girls, along with his partner Ghislane Maxwell—who is currently serving 20 years in prison—he was not running a sex-trafficking ring that included other powerful figures.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said the files he and other lawmakers reviewed yesterday told a much different story.

“It’s disgusting,” he said. “There are lots of names, lots of co-conspirators, and they’re trafficking girls all across the world.”

Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) put it more succinctly when a Drop Site News reporter caught her on the way back from the DOJ office and asked what she learned from viewing the files.

“There’s a bunch of sick f----,” she said.

Lawmakers also said the documents contradicted Trump’s claims that he booted Epstein from membership at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, and disassociated from him in the early 2000s because the predator was poaching young female workers from the resort. Trump has said that one of them was the late Virginia Giuffre, then a 17-year-old locker room employee, who’d go on to become one of Epstein’s victims and most prominent accusers.

According to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), “for some indeterminate, inscrutable reason,” the DOJ concealed a summary of statements allegedly made by Trump, provided by Epstein’s lawyers, in which the president said he never asked Epstein to leave the club.

Balint confirmed she saw the same document.

“One [document] was related to whether or not Trump had ever kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, as he claimed,” she said. “It’s not true. It’s a lie.”

The law passed in November requiring the files’ release mandates that victims of Epstein’s abuse have their privacy protected, but forbids the DOJ from redacting information to protect prominent individuals, including government officials, from embarrassment.

“The broader issue is why so many of the files they’re getting are redacted in the first place,” Khanna said. “What Americans want to know is who the rich and powerful people are who went to [Epstein’s] island? Did they rape underage girls? Did they know that underage girls were being paraded around?”

Massie and Khanna said they were disappointed to find that many of the files that were supposed to be available were still heavily redacted. Massie lamented that the DOJ had not yet provided access to the FBI’s 302 forms, which contain official summaries of interviews with witnesses and victims.

Raskin said viewing the files affirmed many of the concerns about the DOJ “over-redacting” files.

“We didn’t want there to be a cover-up, and yet, what I saw today was that there were lots of examples of people’s names being redacted when they were not victims,” Raskin told CNN. “There are thousands and thousands of pages replete with redactions. There are entire pages in memos where you can’t see anything.”

Lawmakers were given permission to view the files in a letter sent by the DOJ on Friday, following mounting criticism about the extensive number of redactions in the public release. They are required to sift through the files in a tightly-secured DOJ office and are barred from making copies available to the public, though they are allowed to take notes.

Raskin said that the office contains only four computers, making the process of sorting through more than 3 million files agonizingly slow.

“Working 40 hours a week on nothing else but this, it would take more than seven years for the 217 members who signed the House discharge petition to read just the documents they’ve decided to release,” he wrote in a post on social media.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee about the handling of the files on Wednesday. Massie said he plans to grill her about why so many potential co-conspirators had their names redacted in the public release.

“I would like to give the DOJ a chance to say they made a mistake and over‑redacted and let them unredact those men’s names,” he said. That would probably be the best way to do it.“

Blanche has responded to the criticism on social media, saying, “The DOJ is committed to transparency.”

Khanna, who appeared on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday morning, said that based on what he saw in the public release, the opposite is true.

“ Donald Trump had the FBI scrub those files in March,” he said. “And the documents we saw already had the redactions of the FBI from March. So we still have not seen the vast majority of documents unredacted that have the survivor statements of the rich and powerful men who committed these crimes.”

Led by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, four Democratic senators on Wednesday outlined plans to reduce the costs of prescription drugs after President Donald Trump claimed he would do so—only to allow Big Pharma companies to delay negotiating lower prices and secure “zero commitments” from top executives on making lifesaving medications more affordable for millions of Americans.

“There is no greater fraud than Donald J. Trump when it comes to lower drug prices,” Wyden (D-Ore.) said. “Our doors are wide open to anybody who wants to take the bold next step forward on lowering drug costs for Americans.”

Along with a “flash report” on Trump’s “broken promises” regarding his pledge to bring drug prices down “to levels nobody ever thought was possible,” Wyden sent a Dear Colleague letter to Democratic senators regarding his committee’s plans to follow through with lowering costs.

“Finance Committee minority staff will dedicate substantial time and effort this year to developing the next generation of healthcare solutions that lower costs for American families,” Wyden wrote. “These solutions will rein in Big Pharma’s outrageous price increases, lower costs for consumers, guarantee predictability for patients, and reduce wasteful government spending that pads the profits of big corporations. Alongside the co-signers of this letter, I invite you to be a part of this bold vision.”

The letter, co-signed by Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), notes that “the only concrete drug pricing policy Trump enacted within the past year was a price hike for the biggest blockbuster cancer drugs on Earth, giving an $8.8 billion windfall to the pharmaceutical industry.”

In contrast, the senators wrote, the Senate Finance Committee will develop policies to incorporate international pricing models into the Medicare drug price negotiation framework, including by allowing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to consider international prices as a factor or penalize drugmakers when pricing for US customers exceeds international benchmarks.

“Democrats are determined to bring prices down, and we’re willing to work with anyone to find concrete ways to do it.”

The committee will also work to end Republican “blockbuster drug bailouts from negotiation,” like the ones included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that shielded several high-priced drugs—including the cancer drug Keytruda—from Medicare price negotiations.

“The Republican budget bill contained a nearly $9 billion sweetheart deal that benefits the biggest drug companies by delaying or exempting some lifesaving medications from negotiation,” reads the Democrats’ flash report.

Gallego said that “when Big Pharma gets richer off the back of a grandmother struggling to pay for cancer medication, the system is broken.”

“That’s what this is all about: Big Pharma execs sitting in their fancy corner offices profiting off of sick, working-class Americans,” the senator said. “We are not going to accept an America where millions of families live in fear of getting sick and needing to fill a prescription. We are going to fight and fight hard for a healthcare system that does what Donald Trump never did: actually lower costs for working families.”

The lawmakers emphasized that even if manufacturers are forced to lower drug prices, patients are not currently guaranteed to directly benefit, because as much as 45% of the $5.4 trillion the US spends on healthcare annually is “absorbed by middlemen such as insurers, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and drug distributors.”

“Healthcare middlemen profit when drug costs are high because they make money off of drug margin or payments that are linked to the price of a drug, ripping off patients who pay more than they should. Medicare Part D and the patients it serves should stop footing the bill for inflated drug prices and instead pay for drugs in a more transparent manner that reduces middleman margin,” wrote the senators.

The Finance Committee will develop policies to eliminate abuses in the prescription drug supply chain including “egregious drug price markups,” and to ensure that patient cost-sharing on drugs more closely aligns with the costs to plans and PBMs.

Finally, the Democrats said they would work to fix the “unmitigated disaster” that Trump and Kennedy have been “for innovation and drug development,” as the administration has proposed slashing the National Institutes of Health budget by 40% and has cut off access to treatment for an estimated 74,000 patients who were enrolled in NIH clinical trials.

The Finance Committee, they said, plans to create new incentives for innovation and drug development, including through the tax code.

In their flash report, the Democrats wrote that while failing to force Big Pharma to the negotiating table to save money for Americans, Trump “has been parading Big Pharma executives through the White House, claiming to be cutting cost-saving deals with these corporations.”

“One look under the hood reveals the truth: Trump is giving them a pass on tariffs, while receiving zero commitments about how they will lower costs for taxpayers and patients,” they wrote. “Donald Trump is getting fleeced by Big Pharma CEOs, and Americans are going to foot the bill.”

Welch said that the president “loves to talk a big game and make promises to working families about lowering prescription drug prices. But in reality, his administration is handling this like a PR problem: They’ve got to keep moving and talking about it, but then do nothing to really address the crisis.”

“Democrats are determined to bring prices down, and we’re willing to work with anyone to find concrete ways to do it,” said Welch. “We’re going to lower healthcare costs and ensure everyone can access affordable, lifesaving, and pain-relieving medication.”

Law enforcement authorities in France on Tuesday executed a raid on the offices of the social media company X, owned by the world’s wealthiest person Elon Musk, backed by allegations of unlawful “abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction” by company executives.

The mid-morning operation by the nation’s federal cybercrime unit, the Unité Nationale Cyber, also involves the EU police agency Interpol as part of an investigation opened in January 2025 into whether the platform’s algorithm had been used to illegally interfere in French politics.

According to Le Monde:

French prosecutors also said they had summoned X owner Elon Musk for a voluntary interview in April as part of the investigation. “Summons for voluntary interviews on April 20, 2026, in Paris have been sent to Mr. Elon Musk and Ms. Linda Yaccarino, in their capacity as de facto and de jure managers of the X platform at the time of the events,” it said. Yaccarino resigned as CEO of X in July last year, after two years at the company’s helm.The investigation was opened following two complaints in January 2025 and then broadened after additional reports criticized the AI chatbot Grok for its role in disseminating Holocaust denials and sexual deepfakes, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. One of the complaints came from Eric Bothorel, an MP from President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, who complained of “reduced diversity of voices and options” and Musk’s “personal interventions” in the platform’s management since he took it over.

The statement by the Paris prosecutor’s office said, “At this stage, the conduct of this investigation is part of a constructive approach, with the aim of ultimately ensuring that the X platform complies with French laws, insofar as it operates on national territory.”

In the wake of immigration agents’ killings of three US citizens within a matter of weeks, the Department of Homeland Security is quietly moving forward with a plan to expand its capacity for mass detention by using a military contract to create what Pablo Manríquez, the author of the immigration news site Migrant Insider calls “a nationwide ‘ghost network’ of concentration camps.”

On Sunday, Manríquez reported that “a massive Navy contract vehicle, once valued at $10 billion, has ballooned to a staggering $55 billion ceiling to expedite President Donald Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ agenda.”

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It is the expansion of a contract first reported on in October by CNN, which found that DHS was “funneling $10 billion through the Navy to help facilitate the construction of a sprawling network of migrant detention centers across the US in an arrangement aimed at getting the centers built faster, according to sources and federal contracting documents.”

The report describes the money as being allocated for “new detention centers,” which “are likely to be primarily soft-sided tents and may or may not be built on existing Navy installations, according to the sources familiar with the initiative. DHS has often leaned on soft-sided facilities to manage influxes of migrants.”

According to a source familiar with the project, “the goal is for the facilities to house as many as 10,000 people each, and are expected to be built in Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Utah, and Kansas.”

Now Manríquez reports that the project has just gotten much bigger after a Navy grant was repurposed weeks ago. It was authorized through the Worldwide Expeditionary Multiple Award Contract (WEXMAC), a flexible purchasing system that the government uses to quickly move military equipment to dangerous and remote parts of the world.

The contract states that the money is being repurposed for “TITUS,” an abbreviation for “Territorial Integrity of the United States.” While it’s not unusual for Navy contracts to be used for expenditures aimed at protecting the nation, Manríquez warned that such a staggering movement of funds for domestic detention points to something ominous.

“This $45 billion increase, published just weeks ago, converts the US into a ‘geographic region’ for expeditionary military-style detention,” he wrote. “It signals a massive, long-term escalation in the government’s capacity to pay for detention and deportation logistics. In the world of federal contracting, it is the difference between a temporary surge and a permanent infrastructure.”

He says the use of the military funding mechanism is meant to disburse funds quickly, without the typical bidding war among contractors, which would typically create a period of public scrutiny. Using the Navy contract means that new projects can be created with “task orders,” which can be turned around almost immediately, when “specific dates and locations are identified” by DHS.

“It means the infrastructure is currently a ‘ghost’ network that can be materialized anywhere in the US the moment a site is picked,” Manríquez wrote.

Amid its push to deport 1 million people each year, the White House has said it needs to dramatically increase the scale of its detention apparatus to add more beds for those who are arrested. But Manríquez said documents suggest “this isn’t just about bed space; it’s about the rapid deployment of self-contained cities.”

In addition to tent cities capable of housing thousands, contract line items include facilities meant for sustained living—including closed tents likely for medical treatment and industrial-sized grills for food preparation.

They also include expenditures on “Force Protection” equipment, like earth-filled defensive barriers, 8-foot-high CONEX box walls, and “Weather Resistant” guard shacks.

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist, said the contract’s provision of materials meant to deal with medical needs and death was “extra chilling.” According to the report, “services extend to ‘Medical Waste Management,’ with specific protocols for biohazard incinerators.”

The new reporting from Migrant Insider comes on the heels of a report last week from Bloomberg that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has used some of the $45 billion to purchase warehouses in nearly two dozen remote communities, each meant to house thousands of detainees, which it said “could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history.”

The plans have been met with backlash from locals, even in the largely Republican-leaning areas where they are being constructed:

This month, demonstrators protested warehouse conversions in New Hampshire, Utah, Texas and Georgia after the Washington Post published an earlier version of the conversion plan. In mid-January, a planned tour for contractors of a potential warehouse site in San Antonio was canceled after protesters showed up the same day, according to a person familiar with the scheduled visit.
In Salt Lake City, the Ritchie Group, a local family business that owns the warehouse ICE identified as a future “mega center” jail, said it had “no plans to sell or lease the property in question to the federal government” after protesters showed up at their offices to pressure them.

On January 20, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) joined hundreds of protesters outside a warehouse in Hagerstown, Maryland, that was set to be converted into a facility that will hold 1,500 people.

The senator called the construction of it and other detention facilities “one of the most obscene, one of the most inhumane, one of the most illegal operations being carried out by this Trump administration.”

Reports of a new influx of funding from the Navy come as Democrats in Congress face pressure to block tens of billions in new funding for DHS and ICE during budget negotiations.

“If Congress does nothing, DHS will continue to thrive,” Manríquez said. “With three more years pre-funded, plus a US Navy as a benefactor, Secretary Kristi Noem—or any potential successor—has the legal and financial runway to keep the business of creating ICE concentration camps overnight in American communities running long after any news cycle fades.”

Democratic Rep. John Larson of Connecticut is an irreplaceable leader in the fight to expand Social Security. As the top Democrat on the Social Security subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, he combines deep policy expertise with passionate advocacy for Social Security’s 67 million beneficiaries and its 185 million contributors.

Rep. Larson’s signature legislation, the Social Security 2100 Act, would increase Social Security’s modest benefits for everyone. It also includes additional targeted increases for the most vulnerable. And it is paid for by requiring millionaires and billionaires, who currently stop paying into Social Security after their first $184,500 in income, to finally pay their fair share.

Not surprisingly, billionaires hate the Social Security 2100 Act—and the man who wrote it. That’s why they are backing Rep. Larson’s primary challenger, corporate lawyer Luke Bronin. Hidden behind shadowy outside groups, they plan to pour enormous sums into the race.

These billionaires know that the clock is ticking. The Social Security 2100 Act has support from nearly 90% of House Democrats. Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has pledged that if Democrats take back the House this November, they will hold a vote on the bill—setting the stage for it to become law the next time there is a Democratic trifecta.

Bronin and his Wall Street buddies can’t understand the fear felt by millions of Americans who don’t know how secure our Social Security is, with billionaires like Elon Musk buying political power to try to demolish the system brick by brick.

Thanks to Rep. Larson’s leadership, we are closer than ever to expanding Social Security. It’s no accident that the Social Security 2100 Act has such widespread support among the entire Democratic caucus, including both progressives and moderates. Rep. Larson made that happen by appealing to his colleagues in person at every opportunity—the type of work many members of Congress leave to their staff.

Rep. Larson is legendary for his tenacity. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was first elected to Congress, she was shunned by Democratic leadership and many of her Democratic colleagues. Not Rep. Larson. He immediately went to her office and asked for her support for the 2100 Act. In fact, I was called by her staffer, who asked me who the guy patiently waiting in her office with a folder for her explaining Social Security expansion was.

Rep. Larson works this tirelessly to educate every member of the caucus about Social Security expansion. AOC signed on—and recorded a video with Rep. Larson about their mutual support for Social Security.

Wall Street and its billionaires know that their best shot at stopping Social Security expansion is to take out Rep. Larson. That’s why they are uniting behind Bronin.

Rep. Larson grew up in a public housing project. He went to state university and then worked as a history teacher. In contrast, Bronin went to a fancy prep school and Yale University. He then worked in corporate law and focused on opportunistically climbing the political ladder.

Bronin was elected mayor of Hartford in 2015, on a pledge to serve out his full term. Bronin broke that pledge to unsuccessfully run for governor of Connecticut two years later. At the time, the Connecticut Mirror reported that “even admirers of Bronin, most of whom declined to be quoted by name, said he risked being seen as an opportunist, someone more interested in advancement than completing a difficult job.”

That’s exactly what Wall Street is looking for, and has found in Luke Bronin—someone who wants power for its own sake, and is happy to carry out its preferred agenda. Wall Street wants to deprive Social Security of its greatest champion in the US House, and Bronin is its weapon of choice.

Tellingly, Bronin attacks Rep. Larson for fighting too hard for Social Security. I think that is because Bronin and his Wall Street buddies can’t understand what life is like for the 154,216 residents of Connecticut’s First Congressional district and the 67 million Americans around the country who rely on Social Security to live their lives independently and with dignity.

Bronin and his Wall Street buddies can’t understand the fear felt by millions of Americans who don’t know how secure our Social Security is, with billionaires like Elon Musk buying political power to try to demolish the system brick by brick. President Donald Trump and Musk have closed offices, broken the phones, and most destructively fired thousands of workers needed to keep the system functioning. Larson has been fighting against that destruction and shined a spotlight on it. Social Security is in the greatest danger in its 90 year history, and it is because of Wall Street and its billionaires.

More than ever, we need Rep. Larson leading the fight to protect and expand Social Security.

Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works, the convening organization of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition -- a coalition made up of over 340 national and state organizations representing over 50 million Americans.

More than a month past the deadline set by legislation passed last year, the US Department of Justice on Friday released over 3 million more pages of files related to convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, but one Democratic lawmaker who has led the push for the disclosure emphasized that the exact contents of the files must be determined to tell whether the release is simply another “cover-up.”

“What are we looking for? The FBI statements,” Khanna (D-Calif.) told MS NOW. “We need to see whether the 302 forms are being released. That’s where the survivors mention who the other rich and powerful men are who abused or raped them... and second, are the prosecution memos being released? This is the document that shows why these rich and powerful men weren’t prosecuted.

“If there’s no cover-up,” said the congressman, those files will be included.

Files that were released and circulated on social media on Friday afternoon included multiple descriptions of sexual assault in which President Donald Trump was named. Those did not appear to be official 302 forms from an FBI interview with victims, which typically contain the name of the agent who conducted the interview, the date, and other information.

The New York Times noted that “a significant number of uncorroborated tips” were included in the release.

Prem Thakker of Zeteo said the descriptions of sexual assault allegations appeared to come from an FBI tip line and it was not clear whether they had ever been investigated.

Soon after the documents were released, journalists including CNN‘s Jake Tapper reported on social media that many of the links that had led to the files on the DOJ’s website were no longer active.

MS NOW senior legal reporter Lisa Rubin reported that some of the documents had revealed “the names and other identifying details of known survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. In at least one case, MS NOW found a driver’s license with an unredacted photo among the documents produced.”

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said the release did not appear to comply with an earlier subpoena from the committee, which directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to release all of the Epstein files while protecting survivors.

“Donald Trump and his Justice Department have now made clear that they intend to withhold roughly 50% of the Epstein files, while claiming to have fully complied with the law,” said Garcia. “This is outrageous and incredibly concerning.”

“We are demanding the names of Epstein’s co-conspirators and the men and pedophiles who abused women and girls,” he said. “We will begin a thorough review of this latest limited production, but let’s be clear: Our work and investigation are just getting started.”

Khanna called on Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to meet with him and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to assess what files were released.

“If you are serious about engaging members, let us have this meeting,” he said.

The congressman told the Times that a draft indictment prepared during the 2007 investigation into Epstein in Florida and “hundreds of thousands of emails and files from Epstein’s computers” must also be released.

“Refusing to release these files only shields the powerful individuals who were involved,” said Khanna, “and hurts the public’s trust in our institutions.”

Despite denials from a senior Trump administration official, secret watchlists of Americans are being used by federal agencies to track and categorize US citizens—especially protesters, activists, and critics of law enforcement—as “domestic terrorists,” investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Wednesday.

Klippenstein said that two senior national security officials speaking on condition of anonymity told him that there are over a dozen “secret and obscure” watchlists that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are using to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and pro-Palestine protesters, antifa-affiliated individuals, and “others who are promiscuously labeled ‘domestic terrorists.’”

“I can reveal for the first time,” he wrote, “that some of the secret lists and applications go by codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta (including the ominous sounding HEL-A and HEL-C reports generated by Sparta).”

“Some of these, like Hummingbird, were created to vet and track immigrants, in this case Afghans seeking to settle in the United States,” Klippenstein explained. “Slipstream is a classified social media repository. Others are tools used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking.”

“There’s practically nothing available that further describes what these watchlists do, how large they are, or what they entail,” he added.

Klippenstein’s revelation seemingly flies in the face of DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin’s recent denial that the administration has a database containing the names of people accused of domestic terrorism.

“There’s just one problem: She’s lying,” wrote Klippenstein.

Many observers already thought as much, especially after a masked federal enforcer taunted an anti-ICE protester in Maine by telling her that “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

White House “border czar” Tom Homan—who was recently sent to Minnesota to oversee the anti-immigrant blitz following the departure of Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino amid outrage over the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—also said this month that “we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding, and assault, we’re going to make them famous.”

Reporting Tuesday that Pretti—the nurse who was disarmed and then shot dead by federal enforcers in Minneapolis last week—was known to Trump officials after a previous encounter in which agents broke his rib raised further questions about government watchlists.

“We came out of 9/11 with the notion that we would have a single ‘terrorist’ watch list to eliminate confusion, duplication, and avoid bad communications, but ever since January 6, not only have we expanded exponentially into purely domestic watchlisting, but we have also created a highly secretive and compartmented superstructure that few even understand,” a DHS attorney “intimately familiar” with the matter told Klippenstein on condition of anonymity, referring to the deadly January 2021 Capitol insurrection.

According to Klippenstein:

Prior to 9/11, there were nine federal agencies that maintained 12 separate watchlists. Now, officially there are just three: a watch list of 1.1 million international terrorists, a watch list of more than 10,000 domestic terrorists maintained by the FBI, and a new watch list of transnational criminals, built up to more than 85,000 over the past decade...Among other functions, the new watchlists process tips, situation reports, and collected photographs and video submitted by both the public and from agents in the field; they create a “common operating picture” in places like Minneapolis; they allow task forces to target individuals for surveillance and arrest; and they create the capacity for intelligence people to link individuals together through geographic proximity or what is labeled “call chaining” by processing telephone numbers, emails, and other contact information.

Asked about how the Trump administration might try to legally justify these watchlists, Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program director, cited President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7), which mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

Levinson-Waldman also noted Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 5 memo directing federal agencies to expand the investigation and prosecution of “domestic terrorism,” including groups “aligned” with antifa, an anti-fascist ideology that does not exist as an organization.

One senior intelligence official who confirmed the existence of the watchlists warned Klippenstein: “Lists of this and that—this social media post, that video taken of someone videoing ICE, the mere attendance at a protest—gets pulsed by federal cops on the beat to check for criminality but eventually just becomes a list itself of criminality, with the cops thinking that indeed they are dealing with criminals and terrorists. Watchlists, and the whole watchlisting process, should be as transparent as possible, not the other way around.”

“If we don’t explore more why all of these secret lists exist,” the official added, there could be “even more of an environment of paranoia on the ground and more tragic killings.”

Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry filed a formal note of protest on Tuesday after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent tried to enter the South American nation’s consulate in Minneapolis before being stopped by a staffer inside the building.

In a statement released following the incident, the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry said an ICE agent “attempted to enter the consulate premises,” but “consulate officials immediately prevented” the officer from getting through the door, “thus ensuring the protection of Ecuadorians who were present at the time and activating emergency protocols.”

The ministry said it “immediately presented a note of protest” to the US Embassy in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, “so that acts of this nature are not repeated in any of Ecuador’s consular offices in the United States.”

Under international treaties, law enforcement officers of host nations are barred from entering foreign embassies and consulates without permission.

One eyewitness to the incident in Minneapolis, a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s violent mass deportation efforts, told Reuters that they saw ICE agents “going after two people in the street, and then those people went into the consulate and the officers tried to go in after them.”

Video footage posted to social media shows a consulate official walking quickly to the building’s entryway and repeatedly telling an ICE agent that he “cannot enter.”

The ICE agent can be heard telling the consulate staffer, “If you touch me, I will grab you.”

“ICE set off an international incident in Minneapolis today because agents tried to go into the Consulate of Ecuador without permission, and then yelled at their staff for trying to keep them out,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on social media.

“Note that there is a huge ‘consulate of Ecuador’ sign over the door,” he added, pointing to an image of the building.

Republicans in the US Senate indicated Sunday that they planned to move ahead this week with government funding legislation that includes $10 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a federal agent gunned down intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, a killing captured on video from multiple angles.

“My support for funding ICE remains the same,” declared Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), a sentiment echoed by other GOP lawmakers ahead of votes on a package of six government appropriations bills approved by the US House last week.

“We’re not defunding ICE,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) after the horrific shooting of Pretti. “Live with it.”

An unnamed Senate Republican aide told Punchbowl that “government funding expires at the end of the week, and Republicans are determined to not have another government shutdown. We will move forward as planned and hope Democrats can find a path forward to join us.”

One of the bills up for consideration in the Senate this week would provide $64.4 billion in taxpayer money to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including $10 billion for ICE—an agency that is already more heavily funded than many national militaries. Last summer, congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump approved $170 billion in new funding for immigration enforcement, which ICE has used to massively jack up weapons spending.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) reportedly has the votes from his caucus to block the DHS funding bill.

Senate Democrats have proposed separating the DHS legislation from the rest of the appropriations bills to avoid a looming January 30 shutdown and debate ICE reforms. The American Prospect‘s David Dayen reported late Sunday that Democrats are “going to ask for real investigations into the murders (including an end to impeding the state/local investigations)” as well as an end to arrest quotas and mask-wearing by ICE agents.

“Federal agents cannot murder people in broad daylight and face zero consequences,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the Democrats’ top appropriator in the Senate. “I will NOT support the DHS bill as it stands. The DHS bill needs to be split off from the larger funding package before the Senate—Republicans must work with us to do that. I will continue fighting to rein in DHS and ICE.”

Murray also stressed that “blocking the DHS funding bill will not shut down ICE.”

“ICE is now sitting on a massive slush fund it can tap, whether or not we pass a funding bill,” the senator added. “But we all saw another American shot and killed in broad daylight. There must be accountability, and we must keep pushing Republicans to work with us to rein in DHS.”

“The Senate must immediately take out any additional funding for the Department of Homeland Security in the current spending bill. Congressional Republicans must answer for these killings.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the top Republican appropriator, did not mention ICE funding in her statement on Pretti’s killing, saying only that “this tragic shooting needs to be thoroughly and transparently investigated.”

Assuming unified support from their caucus, Senate Republicans need at least seven Democratic votes to pass the funding package with DHS appropriations included. Last week, seven House Democrats voted with Republicans to approve the DHS funding.

Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a statement that “this federal enforcement agency is running rampant with an outrageous budget that dwarfs most countries’ militaries.”

“The Department of Homeland Security must get ICE off our streets now, and the Senate must immediately take out any additional funding for the Department of Homeland Security in the current spending bill,” said Gilbert. “Congressional Republicans must answer for these killings.”

Amy Fischer, Amnesty International USA’s director for refugee and migrant rights, asked, “How many more people must die before US leaders act?”

“The US Senate faces an urgent choice in the coming days: continue pouring billions of taxpayer dollars into a lawless agency that endangers lives with impunity, or take meaningful action to rein in ICE and stop funding its abuses,” said Fischer.

US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that President Donald Trump has “considered” invoking the Insurrection Act a day after Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that Border Patrol agents’ killing of Alex Pretti had plunged the US into a “dangerous, dangerous moment” in which the White House appeared to be “laying the groundwork” to use the law to deploy the US military for domestic law enforcement.

Noem and other top White House officials, said Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), have been suggesting that leaders like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—both Democrats who have demanded federal agents leave the city and state—are “breaking the law” by following local ordinances that protect immigrants and citizens from immigration enforcement.

Noem has claimed that the two leaders are “'inciting,’ that their resistance and difference from this administration, that their political difference in policy from this administration—she is equating disagreement with incitement,” the congresswoman told CNN Saturday.

She suggested the narrative appears aimed at convincing Americans that actions taken by local and state leaders could result in Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and sending the US military into cities, if he doesn’t agree with the leaders’ policies.

Like Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have in recent days, Noem on Saturday accused the mayor and governor of “encouraging” violence against “our citizens and our law enforcement officers.”

“The Minnesota governor and the Minneapolis mayor need to take a long, hard look in the mirror,” Noem said. “They need to evaluate their rhetoric, their conversations, and their encouragement of such violence.”

She added that Walz “encouraged residents and citizens and violent rioters to resist.”

Over a week ago, Leavitt also accused Walz of “inciting the harassment” of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and said the governor should “pick up the phone and say that he will cooperate with the president and federal government in making Minnesota safer.”

Leavitt held up a photo of people she claimed were undocumented immigrants who had come into the country under the Biden administration and committed violent crimes, but analyses by the libertarian Cato Institute has shown nearly three-quarters of people booked into ICE detention in recent months had no criminal convictions.

The press secretary also accused Democratic governors and mayors of holding state and local law enforcement “hostage” with ordinances barring them from cooperating with ICE.

On CNN, Ocasio-Cortez said that while framing their attacks as though they are targeting Frey and Walz, Noem and Leavitt have actually been “taking issue with the people of Minneapolis and the people of Minnesota, who have duly elected their own elected officials to enact their will. They may not like it, but that is what the people of Minnesota and the people of Minneapolis want. They want people’s civil liberties and civil rights protected.”

“Mayor Frey is executing on the municipal laws passed by duly elected officials, by the people of Minneapolis,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “That is what it means to live in a democracy, and that is precisely what they are trying to threaten and undermine in this moment.”

On Fox News Sunday, Noem said that the question of whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow Trump to deploy the US military to American cities for domestic law enforcement purposes, is “up to the president” before repeating claims that Pretti was to blame for his own death.

The killing was caught on video by witnesses who saw him holding a cellphone as he tried to help a woman who’d been pushed to the ground by an agent, being pepper-sprayed, and then being thrown to the ground and surrounded by several officers, at least one of whom shot him 10 times after another agent had taken his legal firearm away.

Noem claimed, as she and other Trump officials did immediately after Pretti was killed, that he was “confronting” the officers and “impeding” their operations—assertions that are directly contradicted by videos of the incident.

Ocasio-Cortez said on CNN that following the fatal shooting, the administration has been “asking the American people to not believe their eyes, to not believe their ears, and to not believe what they are seeing right before them... They are asking you to instead hand over your belief to anything they say.”

In the original video of the shooting of a man in Minneapolis, identified by the Minneapolis Star Tribune at 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a woman in a pink coat was seen in the background filming the incident with her phone.

Drop Site News obtained footage that appeared “to come from the direction of the woman in pink filming from the sidewalk” and showed the shooting at a closer distance than the footage taken from inside Glam Doll Donuts.

In the video, the shooting victim, dressed in a brown coat and pants, is seen filming a federal agent with his phone. He’s then seen guiding another person toward the sidewalk as the agent forcefully shoves a third person to the ground.

The agent appears to pepper-spray Pretti and pull him away from the other person as a group of several other officers approach and surround him.

They wrestle him to the ground and struggle with him for several seconds before he appears to try to get up. Roughly 10 gun shots ring out and Pretti falls to the ground.

“What the f--- did you do? What the f--- did you do?” yells the woman behind the camera repeatedly.

“Cowards,” said US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) in response to the footage.

The video, said journalist Susan Glasser, “shows that the final act of his life was trying to help a woman who was being physically assaulted by the masked agents who would then kill him.”

The video contradicted the Department of Homeland Security’s claim that Pretti had approached immigration officers with a gun.

In a press conference, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino doubled down on the assertion and claimed Pretti had aimed to “massacre” Border Patrol agents while they conducted operations, but then did not explain when the victim had threatened the officers with his gun.

“Why did... Commander Bovino only take two questions, then abruptly shut down the press conference?” asked US Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif). “Because he knows he can’t defend cold-blooded murder.”

As hundreds of Minneapolis residents assembled in Whittier Park Saturday evening to demand once again that federal immigration agents leave Minnesota following the second fatal shooting of a legal observer in less than three weeks, one speaker demanded that the gathering must not simply be “another damn vigil.”

“This is a turning point,” said Edwin Torres DeSantiago of the Immigrant Defense Network.

He spoke to the crowd hours after several federal officers were filmed surrounding Alex Pretti, 37, after he attempted to help a woman one of them had pushed to the ground, and fatally shooting him.

Torres DeSantiago’s words were echoed by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, which did not mince words about the agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection who have for months roamed the streets of cities including Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, arresting immigrants and US citizens and opening fire nearly two dozen times—killing at least six people including Pretti.

The federal agents recruited by the Trump administration with flyers imploring them to choose between their “homeland” and an “invasion,” said the Lemkin Institute, “are loyal agents of Nazis and white supremacists within the Republican Party. They are behaving as enemies both of the Constitution and of the American people and they must be treated as such.”

“The United States is at a crossroads: Either the American people are able to wrest power from the current fascist leaders or those leaders will continue to radicalize, using violence and terror to dismantle democracy and commit even greater mass atrocities,” said the organization. “History is clear about this.”

The warning came as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it would be investigating the shooting involving its own officers instead of the FBI. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said DHS representatives had blocked them from accessing the crime scene late Saturday, even though officials had obtained a judicial search warrant.

The bureau joined the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in filing a lawsuit to prevent the “destruction of evidence” by DHS.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to order the city’s police department to “take control of the scene of the latest deadly ICE shooting, launch an independent criminal probe, and protect peaceful protesters at the scene from ICE violence.”

“Calling for ICE to leave is not enough. This shooting happened on a city street in the jurisdiction of the Minneapolis law enforcement and they must lead an independent investigation into what appears to be another horrific, unnecessary execution of a Minneapolis resident,” said Mitchell. “ICE should immediately end its deadly and disastrous siege of Minnesota and turn over all evidence and information about this shooting and the prior shooting of Renee Good to local authorities.”

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials continued pushing a narrative which was contradicted by numerous videos of the shooting and the moments leading up to it, claiming Pretti had “approached” federal agents with a gun. Footage shows Pretti holding only a phone, not a firearm, and one of agents involved in wrestling him to the ground after he was pepper-sprayed reaches into the scuffle empty-handed and then pulls out a gun before the multiple shots were fired.

Pretti was armed with a gun that he was carrying lawfully and had a permit for, local authorities said.

Despite the video evidence, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem repeated almost verbatim the claim she made earlier this month when an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in another incident that did not match the administration’s description in footage taken by bystanders: “Fearing for his life and the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots.”

Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, said without any evidence soon after the shooting that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement,” and Trump called Pretti a “gunman.”

The shooting came days after seven Democrats in the US House joined Republicans in passing a funding bill for DHS without securing restrictions on ICE, despite growing national outrage over federal immigration agents’ operations and Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

The bill still needs to go through the Senate and is one of several funding measures that need to pass by January 30 to keep the government open.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement after Pretti was killed that “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”

“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling—and unacceptable in any American city,” said Schumer. “Democrats sought common sense reforms in the Department of Homeland Security spending bill, but because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.”

Democratic senators who had been expected to support the $64.4 billion in DHS funding, which includes $10 billion for ICE, said after the shooting that they would not do so.

“I cannot and will not vote to fund DHS while this administration continues these violent federal takeovers of our cities,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.).

Vice President JD Vance is being called out by legal experts and other critics who say he lied voluminously on Thursday in response to questions about his past claims that immigration agents enjoyed “absolute immunity,” about whether they are now illegally entering residences without warrants, and about the shooting of Renee Good.

Vance was peppered with questions during a press conference after meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis, where their conduct has been met with growing backlash in recent weeks, following the shooting of Good on January 7 by agent Jonathan Ross and other violent and unconstitutional actions that have been documented since.

Shortly after the shooting, in a rush to clear Ross of any wrongdoing, Vance made the highly dubious claim that because Ross was “a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action,” he is therefore “protected by absolute immunity.”

Legal scholars immediately called out the concept of “absolute immunity” as a fiction that does not refer to any recognized statute.

But despite those remarks having been widely publicized just weeks ago, when asked about them again on Thursday, Vance pretended he never made such a claim.

“No, I didn’t say—and I don’t think any other official within the Trump administration said that officers who engaged in wrongdoing would enjoy immunity. That’s absurd,” he said. “What I did say is that when federal law enforcement officers violate the law, that is typically something that federal officials would look into.”

“But of course we’re going to investigate these things,” Vance continued. “We’re investigating the Renee Good shooting. But we’re investigating them in a way that respects people’s rights and ensures that if somebody did something wrong, yes, they’re going to face disciplinary action. But we’re not going to judge them in the court of public opinion.”

In reality, the administration repeatedly said it is not pursuing a criminal investigation into Ross. According to a report from the Washington Post earlier this week, the FBI opened an initial probe into the shooting, and an agent in Minnesota found that “sufficient grounds” existed to open a civil rights probe into Ross, but DOJ officials chose not to pursue it.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed last week that the DOJ was not investigating the case. “We don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody putting his life in danger. We never do,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s officials have repeatedly “judged” the case in the court of public opinion by routinely making statements justifying the shooting, with Vance himself praising Ross for “doing his job” and others in the administration referring to Good as a “domestic terrorist.”

While it is not investigating Ross for shooting Good, the DOJ is reportedly investigating Good’s widow, Becca Good, over the couple’s involvement in monitoring and protesting ICE’s actions in Minneapolis, which prompted six federal prosecutors with the DOJ to resign in outrage last week.

Xochitl Hinojosa, a former head of public affairs at the DOJ, found Vance’s claim that the shooting was being investigated to be in total contradiction to everything else the administration has said about the case.

“Todd Blanche says no criminal civil rights investigation into the shooting of Renee Good. Vance says today they are investigating the incident,” she said. “So who exactly is investigating the incident? Because this would normally be the DOJ or the FBI.”

While those claims were self-evidently false, legal scholars noted a more “pernicious” lie by Vance in response to a question about a report earlier this week that ICE had issued a memo allowing agents to forcibly enter homes without a judge’s warrant, which has been described as a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.

Asked if the memo, which was first reported on by the Associated Press, violated the Constitution, Vance responded that the story was “missing a whole lot of context” and that what ICE and other agencies proposed was that “we can get administrative warrants to enforce administrative immigration law.”

“Nobody is talking about doing immigration enforcement without a warrant. We’re talking about different types of warrants that exist in our system,” Vance went on. “Typically, in the immigration system, those are handled by administrative law judges. So we’re talking about getting warrants from those administrative law judges... That’s very consistent with the practice of American law.”

Rob Doar, a Minnesota-based criminal defense and civil rights attorney, said that Vance had gotten “just about everything wrong” in his explanation.

“Immigration judges are not [administrative law judges]. They don’t issue warrants,” Doar said. “ICE ‘administrative warrants’ are signed by ICE officers, not judges. They do not authorize home entry. Only a judicial warrant does.”

Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and the co-editor-in-chief of Just Security said it was a case of “pernicious wordplay by Vance.”

The Department of Homeland Security “is doing immigration enforcement in people’s homes without a judicial warrant,” he said. “Our system—the Fourth Amendment—requires a judicial warrant.”

Joe Mastrosimone, a law professor at Washburn University in Kansas, was amazed that a lawyer of Vance’s pedigree could be so inaccurate.

“Good Lord,” he wrote on social media. “Did JD Vance actually attend and graduate from Yale Law School? He seems to be a really bad lawyer... This is really basic stuff.”

US President Donald Trump declared Tuesday after a call with the head of NATO that “there can be no going back” on his push to seize Greenland as Denmark deployed more troops to the island, amid widespread concerns that Trump could try to take it by military force.

In an early morning post to his social media platform, Trump said he agreed to a “meeting of the various parties” in Davos, Switzerland and reiterated his view that Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, “is imperative for National and World Security.”

“There can be no going back—On that, everyone agrees!” the US president wrote. “The United States of America is the most powerful Country anywhere on the Globe, by far... We are the only POWER that can ensure PEACE throughout the World—And it is done, quite simply, through STRENGTH!”

Trump later appeared to leak text messages he received from French President Emmanuel Macron, who—according to screenshots posted by the US president—wrote to Trump: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland.”

“Let us try to build great things,” one of the messages reads.

Trump also posted a screenshot of a text message purportedly from NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who wrote that he is “committed to finding a way forward on Greenland.”

The developments came as the head of the Royal Danish Army and a “substantial contribution” of soldiers reportedly landed in Greenland to participate in multinational military exercises known as Operation Arctic Endurance. Germany, Sweden, France, Norway, the Netherlands, and Finland have also sent troops to Greenland in recent days.

Wielding the threat of economic warfare, Trump has demanded that European nations capitulate to a deal for “the complete and total purchase of Greenland” by the US. But the American president has also declined to rule out using force to seize the mineral-rich island, which Trump donors and allies have long been eyeing greedily.

Asked Monday whether he would try to seize Greenland by force, Trump replied: “No comment.”

Amidst national outrage this week over the killing by Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent, members of Minnesota’s congressional delegation on Saturday were blocked from full access to a federal immigration detention center in the city—but at least one lawmaker among them warns something much more sinister is now taking place in the state.

“I was just denied access to the ICE processing center at the Whipple Building,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents the state’s 5th District. “Members of Congress have a legal right and constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight where people are being detained. The public deserves to know what is taking place in ICE facilities.”

Omar shared a video of herself, along with Reps. Angie Craig and Kelly Morrison, outside the facility as large numbers of masked federal agents in protective gear blocked the driveway entrance.

In a telephone interview with MSNOW, Omar later explained that she and her colleagues arrived at the facility Saturday morning in order to conduct oversight activities. While Omar said they were initially allowed to enter the building, they were shortly after told they “had to wait until higher-ups were able to come speak with us.”

It seemed to Omar, she said, that the order to halt their visit “maybe came from Washington to deny us the proper access that we needed to complete those oversight duties that we are obligated as members of Congress.”

Calling it a clear violation of their oversight authority, Omar and Craig explained to reporters what happened after they were denied further access to the facility:

Congresswoman Craig also spoke to MSNOW’s Ali Velshi:

Noting the size and scale of the presence of armed federal agents now deployed in her state, Omar suggested in her interview with MSNOW that the recent Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) operations being conducted serve no purpose other than to harass and terrorize local communities. That militarized presence has only grown since Trump ordered more agents to the city following Wednesday’s killing of Good and the protests that have erupted as a result.

“ Protest is as American as apple pie,” said Omar. “People come out to register their opposition to what they do not like or want to accept. It is important for people to be able to do that in a democracy.”

“What we are seeing right now, not only from the surge of 2,000 federal agents—now we have another 1,000 apparently coming in—it is essentially trying to create this kind of environment where people feel intimidated, threatened, and terrorized. And I think the ultimate goal of [Homeland Security Security Secretary] Kristi Noem and President Trump is to agitate people enough where they are able to invoke the Insurrection Act to declare martial law.”

“There is,” she continued, “no other justifiable way to describe what is taking place in Minneapolis at this moment. There is no justifiable reason why this number of agents is here in our state.”

The congressmen behind the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Thursday asked a federal judge to appoint a “special master and/or independent monitor” to ensure that the Trump administration actually releases the documents from the trafficking case against deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as required by the new law.

Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) led the monthslong congressional effort to pass the legislation, which Trump—a former friend of Epstein who’s repeatedly mentioned in the files—signed in November. Since then, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has published some heavily redacted materials but blown the December 19 deadline to release everything.

“We have offered for six months to meet with the Justice Department to help them get the right documents out, and we’re now going to be intervening with the Southern District of New York (SDNY) to ask those judges to appoint a special master and ensure that all the documents are released,” Khanna told NPR last week.

Khanna and Massie did so with a Thursday letter to Judge Paul Engelmayer, writing to the appointee of former President Barack Obama that “we have urgent and grave concerns about DOJ’s failure to comply with the act as well as the department’s violations of this court’s order.”

As MS NOW—which initially reported on the letter—explained, “Engelmayer oversees the case involving Ghislaine Maxwell, and last month, the Justice Department obtained Engelmayer’s permission to release grand jury materials and other evidence provided to Maxwell in discovery that were redacted or sealed per a court order.”

On December 24, the DOJ announced that it had received over a million more documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and SDNY “to review them for release, in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, existing statutes, and judicial orders.” The department added then that “due to the mass volume of material, this process may take a few more weeks.”

Khanna and Massie noted in their letter that the DOJ’s most recent court filing on Monday states the department has only produced “approximately 12,285 documents (compromising approximately 125,575 pages)” and there is still “more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the act in various phases of review.”

As the lawmakers pointed out: “Other reports suggest that the DOJ may be reviewing more than 5 million pages. Because these figures are self-reported and internally inconsistent with prior representations, there is reasonable suspicion that the DOJ has overstated the scope of responsive materials, thereby portraying compliance as unmanageable and effectively delaying disclosure.”

According to their letter:

The conduct by the DOJ is not only a flagrant violation of the mandatory disclosure obligations under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but as this court has recognized in its previous rulings, the behavior by the DOJ has caused serious trauma to survivors. In addition, the DOJ has not complied with Section 3 of the act, which requires the attorney general, within 15 days of the deadline for release, to submit a report to the House and Senate Judiciary committees identifying the categories of records released and withheld and summarizing all redactions and their legal bases. To date, no such report has been provided. Without it, there is no authoritative accounting of what records exist, what has been withheld, or why, making effective oversight and judicial review far more difficult.
Put simply, the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the act.

Khanna and Massie added that “while we believe that criminal violations have taken place and must be addressed, the most urgent need now is for the DOJ to produce all the documents and electronically stored information required by the act.”

The pair has threatened to bring inherent contempt proceedings against US Attorney General Pam Bondi. Asked about that on Tuesday, Massie told MS NOW that they were assessing the situation and still hoped for DOJ compliance.

“Hopefully, we don’t have to do it,” the congressman said. “But when we feel like we need to do it, we’ll do it.”

One of President Donald Trump’s top billionaire donors, who has spent the past several months backing a push for regime change in Venezuela, is about to cash in after the president’s kidnapping of the nation’s president, Nicolas Maduro, this weekend.

While he declined to tell members of Congress, Trump has said he tipped off oil executives before the illegal attack. At a press conference following the attack, he said the US would have “our very large United States oil companies” go into Venezuela, which he said the US will “run” indefinitely, and “start making money” for the United States.

As Judd Legum reported on Monday for Popular Information, among the biggest beneficiaries will be the billionaire investor Paul Singer:

In 2024, Singer, an 81-year-old with a net worth of $6.7 billion, donated $5 million to Make America Great Again Inc., Trump’s Super PAC. Singer donated tens of millions more in the 2024 cycle to support Trump’s allies, including $37 million to support the election of Republicans to Congress. He also donated an undisclosed amount to fund Trump’s second transition.

Singer is also a major pro-Israel donor, with his foundation having donated more than $3.3 million to groups like the Birthright Israel Foundation, the Israel America Academic Exchange, Boundless Israel, and others in 2021, according to tax filings.

In November 2025, less than two months before Trump’s operation to take over Venezuela, Singer’s investment firm, Elliott Investment Management, inked a highly fortuitous deal.

It purchased Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, for $5.9 billion—a sale that was forced by a Delaware court after Venezuela defaulted on its bond payments.

The court-appointed special master who forced the sale, Robert Pincus, is a member of the board of directors for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Elliott Management hailed the court order requiring the sale in a press release, saying it was “backed by a group of strategic US energy investors.”

Singer acquired the Citgo’s three massive coastal refineries, 43 oil terminals, and more than 4,000 gas stations at a “major discount” because of its distressed status. Advisers to the court overseeing the sale estimated its value at $11-13 billion, while the Venezuelan government estimated it at $18 billion.

As Legum explained, the Trump administration’s embargo on Venezuelan oil imports to the United States bore the primary responsibility for the company’s plummeting value:

Citgo’s refiners are purpose-built to process heavy-grade Venezuelan “sour” crude. As a result, Citgo was forced to source oil from more expensive sources in Canada and Colombia. (Oil produced in the United States is generally light-grade.) This made Citgo’s operations far less profitable.

It is the preferred modus operandi for Singer, whose hedge fund is often described as a “vulture” capital group. As Francesca Fiorentini, a commentator at Zeteo, explained, Singer “is famous for doing things like buying the debt of struggling countries like Argentina for pennies on the dollar and then forcing that country to repay him with interest plus legal fees.”

Venezuelan Vice President and Minister of Petroleum Delcy Rodríguez called the sale of Citgo to Singer “fraudulent” and “forced” in December.

After the US abducted Maduro this week, Trump named Rodriguez as Venezuela’s interim president—and she was formally sworn in Monday—but he warned that she’ll pay a “very big price” if she refuses to do “what we want.”

That is good news for Singer, who is expected to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of an oil industry controlled by US corporations, which will likely not be subject to crippling sanctions.

Singer has reportedly met with Trump directly at least four times since he was first elected in 2016, most recently in 2024. While it is unknown whether the two discussed Venezuela during those meetings, groups funded by Singer have pushed aggressively for Trump to take maximal action to decapitate the country’s leadership.

Since 2011, Singer has donated over $10 million and continues to sit on the board of directors for the right-wing Manhattan Institute think tank, which in recent months has consistently advocated for Maduro to be removed from power. In October, it published an article praising Trump for his “consistent policies against Venezuela’s Maduro.”

He has also been a major donor to the neoconservative think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), serving as its second-largest contributor from 2008-2011, with more than $3.6 million.

In late November, shortly before Trump announced that the US had closed Venezuelan airspace and began to impound Venezuelan oil tankers, FDD published a policy brief stating that the US has “capabilities to launch an overwhelming air and missile campaign against the Maduro regime” that it could use to remove him from power.

Singer himself has acted as a financial attack dog for Trump during his first year back in office. In June, he contributed $1 million to fund a super PAC aiming to oust Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who’d become Trump’s leading Republican critic over his Department of Justice’s refusal to release its files pertaining to the billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

A super PAC tied to Miriam Adelson, another top pro-Israel donor who recently said she’d give Trump $250 million if he ran for a third term, also reportedly helped to fund the campaign against Massie.

Massie has since gone on to be one of the most vocal opponents in Congress to Trump’s regime change push in Venezuela, joining Democrats to co-sponsor multiple failed war powers resolutions that would have reined in the president’s ability to launch military strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and launch an attack on mainland Venezuela.

As the Trump administration has asserted that American corporations are entitled to the oil controlled by Venezuela’s state firm, Massie rebutted this weekend that: “It’s not American oil. It’s Venezuelan oil.”

“Oil companies entered into risky deals to develop oil, and the deals were canceled by a prior Venezuelan government,” he said. “What’s happening: Lives of US soldiers are being risked to make those oil companies (not Americans) more profitable.”

Massie said that Singer, “who’s already spent $1,000,000 to defeat me in the next election, stands to make billions of dollars on his distressed Citgo investment, now that this administration has taken over Venezuela.”

Fiorentini added that “Paul Singer’s shady purchase of Citgo has everything to do with this coup.”

The Trump administration provoked horror this week with the suggestion that the United States could be turned into a paradise if over a quarter of the people in the country were deported.

On Wednesday, the official social media account for the Department of Homeland Security posted a piece of artwork depicting a pink late-1960s Cadillac Eldorado parked on a bright, idyllic beach. Over the clear blue sky are the words “America after 100 million deportations.The post was captioned by the agency: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.”

Social media users later discovered that DHS had, ironically, stolen the image from the Japanese pop artist Hiroshi Nagai without giving credit.

It is hardly the first time the administration has used edgy and inflammatory social media posts to promote its agenda. But DHS has come under particular scrutiny for its style of communication, which often evokes white nationalist rhetoric and symbolism.

Posts by the agency have cheered “remigration,” a term that far-right parties in Europe have often used to describe the forced repatriation of nonwhite populations, including citizens. Other posts have referred to President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” campaign as part of an effort to defend American “heritage” and “culture.”

The agency frequently evokes images of the American frontier and references “Manifest Destiny,” at times explicitly posting artwork glorifying the forced displacement of Native American populations.

An image by the agency, featuring a chiseled Uncle Sam calling on Americans to “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS,” was even directly sourced from an overt neo-Nazi account.

The agency has only continued to double down in the face of criticism this week. On Friday, it posted that “2026 will be the year of American Supremacy” over an image of then-Gen. George Washington crossing the Delaware River, which was emblazoned with the words “Return this Land,” a possible reference to a recently-founded “whites-only” town in rural Arkansas known as “Return to the Land.”

But Wednesday’s post calling for “100 million deportations” specifically was perhaps the most direct nod yet to those who believe the United States must be reconstituted as a white nation. As social media users were quick to point out, only about 47 million people living in America are foreign-born, according to the US Census Bureau.

Even if the administration kicked out every single immigrant—including legal residents and naturalized citizens—meeting such a goal would mean deporting 53 million people who were born in the US and are legally entitled to citizenship under the 14th Amendment.

If the use of the phrase “third world” did not make it obvious enough, the specific number—100 million—seems to betray the racial motivation behind the message.

Citing 2020 census data on the Wikipedia page for “Demographics of the United States,” one social media user pointed out that approximately 100 million people in the US identified as nonwhite.

The DHS post drew comparisons to one made earlier this year by the close Trump ally and unofficial White House operative Laura Loomer, who suggested that thanks to “Alligator Alcatraz,” the massive internment camp in Florida for those arrested by immigration agents, “the alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals,” which referenced the total number of Hispanic people in the United States.

While it’s almost certainly not possible for the administration to conduct a deportation campaign of such a staggering scale within Trump’s term of office, the administration’s latest post was frightening to many observers, even as they acknowledged that it was a “troll post” meant to rile people up.

It is still reflective of the Trump administration’s ideology with respect to immigration. Leaders of Trump’s deportation effort have acknowledged that they target people based on their appearance, and many nonwhite US citizens have been caught in the dragnet. Meanwhile, its refugee policy has welcomed only white South Africans, as Trump has enacted what he says is a “permanent pause on migration from all Third World Countries.”

During 2026, the administration has said it plans to target hundreds of US citizens each month for “denaturalization,” and Trump has called for it to be used against his most prominent critics, including the Somali-American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and New York’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

“This is absolutely insane Nazi propaganda, posted by the US government,” said Ben Norton, editor of the Geopolitical Economy Report in response to DHS’s call for“100 million deportations.”

“It makes it clear that the Trump administration’s mass deportation drive is not actually about ‘illegal immigration.’ There are estimated to be 14 million undocumented immigrants in the US. But the fascist DHS wants to deport 100 million people,” Norton continued. “This is a call by the US regime for ethnic cleansing of racial minorities, to create a white-supremacist regime without anyone with ‘third world’ heritage.”

Read it in the news:

“Economic Confidence Drops to 17-Month Low”
—Gallup, December 4, 2025“Satisfaction with U.S. healthcare costs is the lowest Gallup has recorded … since 2001.”
—Gallup, December 15, 2025
“ACA credits expire, leading to sharp rise in health insurance premiums.”
—WANF TV Atlanta, January 1, 2026
“We’re going to run (Venezuela) until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”
—Donald Trump, January 3, 2026

The commentary pretty much writes itself. As surely as night follow day, the Trump Administration was bound to do something to distract Americans from their well-founded economic fears—especially from a health cost crisis Trump’s party just made vastly worse. And all that Venezuelan oil looks mighty attractive from an oligarch’s perspective.

But “run Venezuela”? Shouldn’t they do a better job running this country first? Let’s start with healthcare. The Affordable Care Act is what programmers used to call a “kludge”; it’s a Rube Goldberg contraption whose goal is to mitigate the pain caused by America’s so-called healthcare “system.” America’s healthcare crisis can’t truly be fixed until the profit motive is removed.

Nevertheless, the ACA has provided at least some healthcare coverage to millions of people. That’s better than nothing—much better. The premium tax credits are a wealth transfer from the public to the private sector. But without them—and with no other system in place—millions of people will soon face disastrous monthly premium hikes. If they don’t pay them—and many won’t be able to afford it—they’ll face financial ruin if they become sick or injured.

We can recognize the flawed nature of the ACA and still see that these Republican cuts are inhumane and indefensible.

“We can’t afford it,” the Republicans argue. But that raises the obvious question: If not, then how can we afford to “run Venezuela”? Besides, they’ve got work to do right here.

Sure, the economy is doing pretty well—for the investor class. But even that limited success is hanging by a thread. It’s driven by an AI bubble that will almost certainly burst, wreaking economic havoc when it does. Meanwhile, millions of households are struggling with the cost of living.

More than 43 million Americans live in poverty, including one child in seven.

The housing shortage is causing widespread pain as homes become increasingly unaffordable for most workers.

The labor outlook is “cooling,” as the economists say. But even that doesn’t count the most critical element of the job market, which is the ability to find jobs that actually pay a living wage.

Young people are especially hard-hit.

“Energy affordability” is a growing crisis, too. The average American household paid $124 per month more on its utility bill in the first nine months of 2025 and rates are still rising, with no end in sight.

Oh, and the New START treaty will expire in a few weeks, leaving the world with no meaningful limits on the possibility of a new nuclear arms race.

Nuclear catastrophe? It’s not impossible. Doesn’t that warrant some attention from this country’s leaders?

You get the idea. With all these problems to solve, our leaders have decided the right thing to do is—invade Venezuela. That won’t be an easy ride. It’s a country of 28 million people and its terrain that includes jungles, deserts, and mountains.

With all these disasters at home, it’s a safe bet we’re not wanted in Venezuela for our management expertise. In fact, most Venezuelans don’t want us there at all.

Most Venezuelans think the US is only doing it “because of the oil”

The question, translated: “Do you believe that a potential military invasion against Venezuela would aim to overthrow the president in order to seize the oil, or do you think it would be to combat drug trafficking?” The headline: “90% believe that an invasion would aim to overthrow Maduro because of the oil.”

To be fair, we are only doing it because of the oil. Mostly, anyway.

Most Americans don’t want us in Venezuela, either.

In fact, most Americans are sick of our government’s seemingly endless addiction to foreign military adventurism.

And yet, here we are.

This is a desperate resource grab by Trump and the other overseers of this dying economic system. It’s also an obvious and deliberate distraction from the many problems here in the United States. And we all know they’re doing it for their benefit, not ours.

Like the saying goes: it’s all about the grift. But at what price for the rest of us?

Watching President Donald Trump’s speech on national television and Vice President JD Vance’s remarks at the Turning Point event in Arizona, we identified with Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. For those who have not seen the movie, Murray plays a TV weatherman who is trapped reliving the same day, day after day. We felt exactly like Murray when both Trump and Vance claimed once again that they ended taxes on Social Security.

Time after time, fact-checkers and news outlets have pointed out that contrary to Trump and Vance’s claims, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) did not eliminate taxes on Social Security. Most recently, Factcheck.org on December 18 reported that:

Trump called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act he signed in July “perhaps the most sweeping legislation ever passed in Congress” and touted provisions that include “no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.” (As we have said, fewer seniors would pay taxes on Social Security benefits, but millions of Americans would still have to pay.)

On December 21, Yahoo Finance was quite blunt in assessing Trump’s failure to deliver on his promise to end taxes on Social Security:

Prior to and following his inauguration for a non-consecutive second term, Trump had promised to end the most disliked aspect of Social Security. While his plan received nothing short of thunderous applause and overwhelming support from seniors, he ultimately failed to deliver on his vow when the flagship “big, beautiful bill” was signed into law.

MSN back in July forcefully explained why the OBBB could not have eliminated taxes on Social Security:

First and foremost, the idea that the megabill eliminates federal taxes on Social Security—a claim Trump has made repeatedly of late—is plainly false. In fact, congressional Republicans relied on the budget reconciliation process to advance the package, and it’s procedurally impossible to change Social Security through this complex process.

Rather, as the New York Times reported, “older single filers will get the extra $6,000 deduction ($12,000 for couples), as long as their income falls under a certain ceiling (below $75,000 for single filers or $150,000 for married joint filers). Above those income levels, the deduction begins to decrease, and it goes away once single taxpayers’ income reaches $175,000 ($250,000 for couples).” What’s more, the deduction benefit won’t apply for Social Security recipients younger than 65.

Will the Trump administration continue to misrepresent the impact of the OBBB on Social Security? If the past several months is any guide, the answer is an unequivocal yes. Perhaps the Trump administration, to borrow another pop cultural reference, is operating on the George Costanza principle. For those not familiar with the comedy show Seinfeld, Costanza, a hapless character who constantly misrepresents things, explains that he operates on the principle that “it’s not a lie if you believe it.”

A decision from the University of Oklahoma on Monday left some asking whether the research university can still be seen as having “academic standards” after an instructor was removed from teaching duties for giving a failing grade to a student who focused on her own religious beliefs about gender in a paper for a psychology course.

The university released a statement saying the graduate teaching assistant in the course, Mel Curth, had been “arbitrary” in the grading of a paper by student Samantha Fulnecky, who wrote an assigned essay about an article the class read about gender, peer relations, sterotyping, and mental health for the course.

Fulnecky’s paper cited the Bible and focused heavily on her beliefs that “God made male and female and made us differently from each other on purpose and for a purpose.”

“Women naturally want to do womanly things because God created us with those womanly desires in our hearts. The same goes for men,” she wrote in the essay, adding that “society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth.”

Curth, who is transgender, gave Fulnecky a zero for the essay and emphasized in her response that she was “not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” but because the paper “does not answer the questions for the assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.”

“Using your own personal beliefs to argue against the findings of not only this article, but the findings of countless articles across psychology, biology, sociology, etc. is not best practice,” Curth wrote.

Another instructor concurred with Curth on the grade, telling Fulnecky that “everyone has different ways in which they see the world, but in an academic course such as this you are being asked to support your ideas with empirical evidence and higher-level reasoning.”

On Monday, the university suggested Curth’s explanation for the grade was not satisfactory.

“What is there to say other than that the University of Oklahoma has no academic standards?” asked journalist Peter Sterne in response to the university’s statement.

One civil rights advocate, Brian Tashman, added that the school’s decision opens up numerous questions about how academic papers that focus on a student’s religious beliefs will be graded in the future.

“So if a geology student at the University of Oklahoma says in class the earth is 6,000 years young because that’s what they believe, a geology teacher can’t say squat?” asked Tashman. “What if their religion teaches the earth is flat? Or that all of mankind’s problems can be traced back to Xenu?”

Curth had initially been placed on administrative leave earlier this month when Fulnecky filed a religious discrimination complaint with the school.

Fulnecky’s allegations drew the attention of the school’s chapter of Turning Point USA, the right-wing group that advocates for conservative political views on college and high school campuses. The group is closely aligned with the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance spoke at Turning Point’s AmericaFest last weekend—and used the appearance to tell young conservatives that their movement should not root out antisemitism with “purity tests”—and the assassination of its founder, Charlie Kirk, earlier this year, was followed by the White House’s efforts to crack down on what it called left-wing extremism, with President Donald Trump directly blaming the “radical left” for Kirk’s killing before a suspect was identified.

While Fulnecky garnered support from the Turning Point chapter, hundreds of her fellow students rallied in support of Curth in recent weeks, chanting, “Protect Our Professors!” at a recent protest.

A lawyer for Curth said Monday that she is “considering all of her legal remedies, including appealing this decision by the university.”

“Ms. Curth continues to deny that she engaged in any arbitrary behavior regarding the student’s work,” Brittany M. Stewart told the Washington Post.

The university did not release its findings of the religious discrimination investigation it opened into Fulnecky’s case.

The school’s decision to remove Curth from teaching duties, said author Hemant Mehta, “is what academic cowardice looks like.”