News & Politics

President Donald Trump is becoming an authoritarian due to his misuse of America's military, a retired admiral warned on Tuesday — and he added that as a result, "all the power in the world will be irrelevant" to stop other threats to America.

"The war in Iran is far from the first time that U.S. policymakers have failed to appreciate the limits of American power," U.S. Ret. Adm. William H. McRaven, who served in the U.S. Navy from 1977 to 2014, wrote for Foreign Affairs on Tuesday. "But the Trump administration’s use of military force against the Islamic Republic since February 28 offers a particularly glaring example of a mistake that has often characterized American strategy in recent decades. The war was launched without a clear rationale and with a constantly shifting set of objectives — from changing Tehran’s regime and squelching its nuclear ambitions to, more recently, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t closed until the war started. The results, not surprisingly, have been bad both for U.S. interests and for the Middle East."

He added, "Still, to focus only on the blunders in Iran is to miss a deeper problem in U.S. foreign policy—one that preceded and will outlast Donald Trump’s presidency. Although the particular missteps in Iran may stem from the shortcomings of this president and the team around him, the overestimation of the potential of military force has been a growing feature of American strategy since at least the end of World War II. A tendency to wish away the limits of power accounted for some of the greatest mistakes of U.S. statecraft during the Cold War, with Vietnam the clearest and most consequential example. Yet despite an apparent commitment to internalizing the lessons of that overreach, this American delusion — our excessive faith in the capacity of military power to achieve victory and thereby fundamentally political ends — has gotten worse rather than better, especially in the past quarter century."

From there, McRaven reviewed in detail the history of recent major American foreign policy endeavor, from blunders like the Vietnam War and second Iraq War to successes like the first Iraq War. He concludes that section with Trump's war against Iran, which he characterizes as more aimless than even its other misguided predecessors.

"If I have learned one important lesson in over four decades of military service, it’s that to defeat the enemy, you must stand on the ground he holds dear and own it," McRaven argued.

He then explained how much of this is due to Trump's leadership style, which prioritizes loyalty over competence and integrity. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has either fired or denied promotions to personnel based on political factors, as well as their race and sex.

"The dangers of personalistic presidential leadership are severely exacerbated by more politicized leadership in the military," McRaven concluded. "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ongoing purge of military leadership will undermine the civil-military dynamic for years to come. Trump and Hegseth have forced out senior officers across nearly every service, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the army chief of staff. Hegseth has intervened to block career advancement in unprecedented ways, personally removing dozens of officers from promotion lists, often with no explanation (although a disproportionate number seem to have worked for leaders who were viewed as obstacles to Trump’s domestic political goals)."

He also pointed out, "While remaining military leaders will largely stay committed to serving honorably and providing their best advice to civilian leaders in the Pentagon and the White House, this purge is bound to have a chilling effect on the willingness and ability of senior officers to give frank counsel, especially when it comes to the costs and limits of what force can achieve."

Ultimately, when it comes to handling future foreign policy challenges, McRaven argued "we will be limited by moral uncertainty... We will be limited by geography... We will be limited by the will of the enemy... We will be limited by our hesitancy to put troops on the ground... We will be limited by time..."

He then stated, as a warning, "Finally, we will be limited by the quality of our leadership, political and military. Without experienced leaders — leaders who understand the need to establish legitimacy, to build coalitions, to have clear and attainable goals, to commit to the task, to limit the duration of the fight to only what is necessary — all the power in the world will be irrelevant."

McRaven is not the first military expert to question Trump's and Hegseth's handling of the American armed forces. Earlier this week, Trump's own former national security adviser, John Bolton, slammed the president's handling of the Russia-Ukraine war.

"If he and Vladimir Putin are good friends, he thinks US-Russia state-to-state relations are good," John Bolton told Times Radio's Andrew Boulton. "That’s not correct for many reasons. Most importantly, because Vladimir Putin doesn’t see Trump as a friend. He sees him as an easy mark. And every time Trump, in a very needy way, comes to Putin to ask for this diesel deal or something like that, Putin’s more than happy to give it to him and put it in his pocket to call him later."

A former ambassador to Russia told this journalist something similar for Salon in 2019.

"What I do know is that things that the president says serves Russia’s national interest, as defined by Putin," McFaul said at the time. "I want to be very clear about that: as defined by Putin. Other Russians have a different definition of the national interest. When the president, for instance, refuses to acknowledge that we were attacked in 2016, as he’s done repeatedly for years now, that serves Putin’s interest, not America’s national interest."

He added, "When he does so standing next to President Putin at a press conference in Helsinki, and when tossed up what should have been a softball question to say he supports his intelligence community, and he chooses not to, in my view that serves Putin’s interests. That does not serve America’s national interest."

He continued, "That raises the question , 'Why is the president consistently siding with Putin on issues where I think it’s not in America’s national interest?' And I think that deserves further examination."

Billionaire Ken Griffin said Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump made a huge blunder by cutting taxes even further last year, reports Bloomberg.

“[W]e didn’t have the fiscal space to renew the tax cuts,” Griffin said in a Tuesday interview at the Future of Global Markets Conference in New York. Griffin was particularly unnerved at U.S. debt eclipsing $40 trillion. And he added that Republicans “have their hands dirty over the tax cuts the last two years, more than spending increases.”

Griffin, a Republican benefactor whose business empire includes hedge fund Citadel and market-maker Citadel Securities, said the solution is to “grow the damn economy,” and to push Europeans to grow theirs, too.

But he quipped that Trump’s “tariff war with Europe is a fiasco.”

Despite his criticism of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Bloomberg reports Griffin has been one of “biggest donors this election cycle” of Republicans, even to the point of spending tens of millions of dollars to back the Republican Party’s candidates.

He’s given $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund and $5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund. And he also spent “$10 million supporting Byron Donalds,” who’s running for Florida governor. Millions more of his money has gone to backing Republicans in close races, including $2.5 million each for Senators Dan S. Sullivan of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, reported Bloomberg.

The United States budget deficit, which increased to $1.99 trillion this fiscal year from $1.78 trillion in 2025, “approached its highest level since the pandemic, as spending on the military, safety net programs and interest on the debt dwarfed the Trump administration’s cost cuts, Treasury Department figures showed,” according to New York Times reporter Alan Rappeport.

The ever-widening gap between what the U.S. government spends and what it collects in taxes and other revenue comes at a critical moment when investors are already getting spooked about the nation’s surging debt load. These concerns are coupled with stubborn inflation resulting from Trump’s tariffs and his ongoing attacks on Iran and the subsequent bottleneck of Middle Eastern oil.

All of this is driving up borrowing costs and boosting interest rates for mortgages, credit cards and auto loans, pushing them to their highest levels in two decades earlier this month.

The last time the deficit topped $2 trillion was in 2021, when the pandemic prompted Congress to approve a huge stimulus package to help keep the economy afloat. But analysts point out that there is no pandemic-style crisis forcing the nation to take on that load this time — just a president’s extravagant spending policies.

NBC News reports Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, saying it had undermined democracy with a series of rulings, including several that have prompted a new wave of legislative map-drawing that has increasingly eliminated competitive districts.

“Kagan, who has dissented in those cases, also took aim at the majority for striking down campaign finance restrictions and, as she put it, the ‘evisceration’ of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that was enacted to protect minority voters,” reports NBC News.

“Part of the reason why the court got it wrong was a kind of lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences of their decisions,” Kagan told the Catholic University’s law school in Washington D.C. “I do think in all these areas the court has blinded itself to the very deleterious effects of their rulings on how the political system works and has created a democracy that doesn’t work as well as it should.”

Kagan cited the 2019 SCOTUS ruling claiming federal courts could not intervene to limit extreme undemocratic gerrymandering. And she also referenced a series of rulings that gutted the Voting Rights Act, including one this year that led to Republican states eliminating majority Black districts.

At President Donald Trump’s behest, conservative states redrew their congressional maps to maximize the number of seats the majority party can win in that state, often at the expense of majority Black districts. Texas kicked off the mid-decade redistricting, which forced blue states like California to try to mitigate the dame. This in turn, prompted still more red states to enter the fray in what Kagan called “a race to the bottom.”

The lopsided maps deny people “their rights to voting equality,” she said, and they have the effect of “driving people away from the center, towards the wings, toward the extremes” because candidates only have to worry about winning the primary. She added that the failure of the court to take action on the issue is “making what I think is unfortunately a too polarized country even more so.”

In addition, the conservative court majority consistently struck down campaign finance restrictions, which allows parties to flood campaigns with cash.

“I think you know the people of America look around this political system and think that all this money, chasing all these political candidates, is a nightmare, and they’re right,” she said during a question-and-answer session with professor Joel Alicea.

Even as President Donald Trump tries to keep Republicans in control of Congress by offering voters $5,000 if they win, his fellow conservatives are denouncing a business leader for advocating the supposedly socialistic idea of raising taxes on the rich.

"Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines, is under scrutiny from conservative politicians and commentators for saying wealth inequality is a 'danger to society' and calling for a national wealth and inheritance tax in a recent interview," reported The Guardian's Gaya Gupta on Tuesday. "Talking to the New York Times, Kirby was asked about the growing public distrust of CEOs and whether he felt any responsibility to quell that distrust."

Kirby said in the controversial statement, “We should have a national wealth tax – it won’t work by state because people will just move. And I think we should have inheritance taxes that get close to 100 percent at some level. I would pay them.”

Gupta described the reaction as heated.

"In response, headlines from Fox Business and the New York Post decried that Kirby made $32 [million] in 2025," Gupta wrote. "In response to Kirby’s comments, Glenn Beck, a former Fox News host, and other users on X called for a boycott of United Airlines. Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s governor, said the statement was 'audacious.'"

Landy wrote on X, “How audacious from a guy that didn’t even build @united and makes $32 million a year.” After suggesting that Kirby donate to the government, he said, "better yet, he should distribute his salary to the employees at the bottom of the ladder @united!”

He concluded, “Let’s see you step up and place your money where your mouth is!”

These reactions are consistent with the Trump era emphasis on opposing anyone who advocates wealth redistribution, characterizing such policies as inherently socialistic. In the process, Trump and his supporters harken back to political methods that succeeded for the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1980s.

"These are not mere political disagreements, like differences over taxes or regulations," Trump said in a July speech. "Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. … The godless communist morality states that anything is justified to bring about inhuman visions. … They don’t want good, they don’t love God, and they don’t want God."

Despite this rhetoric, Trump has been accused by fellow conservatives as well as non-conservatives of supporting socialistic policies despite saying he opposes socialism. This includes his proposed $5,000 giveaway to every American adult if Republicans reclaim Congress, his stakes and shares in businesses that work with the government and his use of tariffs to help loyalists at the expense of those without connections to the state.

President Donald Trump's Supreme Court is continuing to listen to the legal reasoning of a man whose educational philosophy boils down to "Go to Trump University or die."

That, at least, is the analysis of lawyer and judicial commentator Elie Mystal based on his Tuesday report for The Nation. Mystal described the argument of the new conservatives taking this case to the Supreme Court as influenced by Ed Blum, "the functional spokesperson for the entire white and [Asian American and Pacific Islander] grievance movement, legal gadfly."

The position boils down to being that "every applicant in the country should take a test and the person who scores 'the best' should get into their first-choice school and so on and so forth, until the person who scores the worst can either go to Trump University or kill themselves."

As he wrote at the beginning of his think piece, Mystal explained that "one might think that mediocre white folks and the minority of AAPI parents who have decided to join forces with them would be happy after their victory over affirmative action in the 2023 case known as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. They succeeded in their goal of reinterpreting the 14th Amendment as 'colorblind' — notwithstanding the fact that the 14th Amendment was a direct response to over 200 years of slavery and oppression of Black people in the New World — and with it ushered in a new era of 'white makes right' hiring practices."

Mystal reviewed statistics demonstrating that the 2023 Supreme Court decision has effectively ended affirmative action in this country, but added that "despite victory, the victors are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until Black students are drummed out of the system."

The concern, as articulated by Mystal and others, is that one day the same groups dissatisfied with gutting affirmative action will get their case before the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court will be as convinced by Blum’s "Orwellian" solution "to demand 'mandatory public disclosure' of all of a school’s applicants. 'This would include,' he wrote, 'standardized test scores, GPAs, family income, Pell Grant eligibility, AP coursework and other metrics, broken down by race and ethnicity.'"

Mystal asked readers, "Can you imagine applying to a school and, as a result, watching your family’s personal income become a matter of public record? Can you imagine having to share whether or not you are eligible for a Pell Grant with the entire world? Can you imagine having to do all of this because some guy like Ed Blum doesn’t think you belong in school? In three years, Blum has gone from 'universities shouldn’t consider race' to 'universities should make public personal information, broken down by race and ethnicity, for my edification.'"

He concluded, "The goal isn’t just to keep Black and Latino kids out of schools; it’s to discourage them and their parents from even applying."

Mystal is not without cause to be alarmed that the right-wing Supreme Court could once again side with Blum's reasoning on affirmative action issues. In addition to doing so in 2023, they have overturned precedent on a number of other key issues. In July they overturned a precedent more than nine decades ago to effectively empower Trump to fire whoever he wants in the executive branch; they have also helped him construct an illegal White House ballroom, citing a technicality; and gutting the Voting Rights Act to make it easier to disempower non-white votes.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board panned President Donald Trump’s emerging alliances with hostile nations China and Russia against U.S. allies.

“It’s hard to know what President Trump is up to at any one moment because he operates so much on tactical impulse. But he has long coveted grand bargains with Russia and China, and that may be his motivation now as he hardens his hostility to Ukraine and Europe and courts a Yalta 2 summit with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping,” the board opined.

The WSJ was quick to point out that the Yalta analogy doesn’t even apply because the original team of the first Yalta summit, Stalin and Churchill were U.S. allies in 1945. But the trio do resemble Trump’s plan in the way they seek to “carve up the globe,” according to the WSJ, and that is “the danger with what Mr. Trump says he’s open to now.”

“As we wrote before the 2024 election, this was one of our main fears for his second term,” said the board, pointing out that Putin has floated a meeting with China and Trump to divvy up Ukraine — which would pose a clear threat to U.N. allies.

“A new triumvirate that divided the world into spheres of influence would blow up America’s global credibility as a reliable ally. U.S. allies may be punching bags these days, but the U.S. network from NATO to Japan, South Korea and Australia allows America to deter aggression and maintain peace before threats are dire,” said the board.

And all that damage is pointless, said the board, because Trump can’t “force Ukraine into capitulation.” Plus, Trump “would own the ugly scenes of carnage that followed if he pulled intelligence and targeting help.”

“Curb your enthusiasm about a China alliance as well,” warned the board. “Mr. Trump might want China’s promise not to help Iran, but … Mr. Xi wants Taiwan in his strategic soul, and he aspires to subdue the island without having to take the risk of a blockade or military assault.”

Xi, predicts the WSJ, will no doubt exploit any opening Trump provides to push the U.S. out of the Pacific, even if that means abandoning 23 million free people “across the Taiwan Strait.”

“Trump’s advisers may tell him that voters don’t care about the post-1945 ‘global order.’ But the public understands that China and Russia aren’t American friends, and they know looming trouble abroad when they see it,” said the board. “GOP lawmakers are already unhappy with the President’s appeasement of Mr. Putin, especially given that Mr. Trump has so far failed to rebuild the U.S. military.”

Handing over Europe to Russia, and the Pacific to China, would open a “major party division” at a time when Trump is rapidly cascading into his “lame duck” period.

“It’s true that Congress and the courts can’t stop a determined President on foreign policy, but they can make him pay a political price,” said the WSJ. “A second Yalta is arguably the worst idea of the second Trump term, and the President would be betting far more than his own legacy.”

People familiar with contract services of former Trump attorney Alina Habba say she was granted a plush private job specifically to help a billionaire get a pardon.

The New York Times reports prominent Venezuelan Julio Herrera Velutini was seeking clemency from President Donald Trump, and he got it not long after his daughter gave Trump ally Habba a very lucrative job.

“A billionaire banker from a prominent Venezuelan family, Herrera faced felony bribery charges in the United States and struck an unusually lenient plea deal in August 2025 for a misdemeanor campaign finance violation. But he felt that reduced charge was still a stain on his record,” said Times reporter Tyler Pager.

So, Herrera got his lawyer, Christopher M. Kise — the former Florida solicitor general who was on Trump’s personal legal team — to help arrange a plea for clemency. His 27-year-old daughter, Isabela Herrera, an American citizen, donated $3.5 million to a super PAC tied to Trump. But as of last fall, the pardon was nowhere to be found.

“Then the Herrera family hired Alina Habba, who had been one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and at the time was an adviser at the Justice Department,” reports Pager. “They offered her $10 million a year for four years along with a range of bonuses. In total, including bonuses, she was guaranteed more than $50 million over four years, according to interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times.”

Under the agreement, Habba would become general counsel at Concord Partners, a company that Herrera founded in late 2025 in Florida. But the Times reports the company has no public profile and its business remains unclear “even to some people associated with the Herrera business empire.”

Habba finalized her deal days after the company was registered, but at the time she was also serving as a senior adviser to Attorney General Pam Bondi — complete with a DOJ office and a security detail.

“She formally began her work for Concord Partners on Jan. 1. Weeks later, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Herrera a full and unconditional pardon,” reports Pager. “ … The sequence of events raises questions about how Mr. Herrera secured the pardon and who might have helped him. People familiar with Ms. Habba’s contract said they believed that she was brought in to help with Mr. Herrera’s push for a pardon and expressed surprise at the scale of the compensation.”

Habba told the Times that she denies any role in the pardon, and she says her employment with Herrera was disclosed to and approved by the Justice Department. She added that she was serving as a “special government employee” at the time she penned her contract, and that allows individuals to work for the federal government for up to 130 days and maintain outside employment with conflict-of-interest restrictions.

In 2022, Herrera was charged for his role in a scheme to bribe Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico to dismiss a regulator who was investigating the bank. The Times reports Herrera’s lawyer, Kise, Vázquez and a former F.B.I. agent also pleaded guilty to misdemeanors. All three were pardoned by Mr. Trump at the same time, shortly before they were scheduled to be sentenced for the misdemeanor charges.

Sources speaking with OK! Magazine editor Rob Shuter say disgraced and fired White House ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle has been told to get lost for good.

“Kimberly has been frozen out,” an insider told Shuter for his Naughty But Nice blogShuter for his Naughty But Nice blog. “She’s been told to stop reaching out to Donald Trump. This isn’t a misunderstanding or a temporary disagreement. The message is clear: Stay away.”

Sources said Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée has been instructed to stop contacting the president, or his help, and that she should not expect another White House invitation.

“The White House operates by invitation,” another insider told Shuter. “Kimberly used to be able to walk through doors that were closed to everyone else. Now those doors are closed to her.”

Insiders also told Shuter that the decision is “personal” rather than a routine security matter, like the escort of a fired employee to a building’s front door.

“Kimberly still remembers when she was practically family,” a source said. “But being Donald Jr.’s former fiancée doesn’t give her permanent access to his father.”

Guilfoyle was asked to resign from her position as Ambassador of the United States to Greece amid misconduct allegations in which she was accused of asking a donor to pay her $100,000 American Express bill in exchange for access to high-ranking officials. She also allegedly threatened foreign officials and granted lobbyists privileged access.

Her departure was abrupt. The U.S. Embassy in Greece’s website offered no mention of Guilfoyle last week, and she was quickly scrubbed from the site. In her place on the site is her successor, Josh Huck. The change happened almost immediately after Trump publicly distanced himself from his former future daughter-in-law.

“In Trump world, losing your relationship is painful,” said Shuter. “Losing your access is devastating.”

Still, Trump donor Eric Deters told Daily Beast podcast host Joanna Coles recently that more Guilfoyle drama is on the way. Deters said he will be lining up the Trump family and associates for subpoenas and court depositions when he sues them for defamation in the coming months — and he expects all matter of gritty information to come to light.

“I emailed Susie Wiles — I left Kimberly off this email — and Don Jr., yesterday and I said point Blank, ‘you know I'm going to sue Kimberly Guilfoyle for defamation’ because they said the texts were fake. They told me they were false. They told me that I was a known blackmailer. … [T]hen they said I owed her money and … so they defamed the hell out of me,” said Deters.

Fact-checking President Donald Trump is now not only common practice — it’s essential to news reporting.

On Tuesday, for example, CNN anchor Brianna Keilar did not even blink before pronouncing Trump a liar.

“[H]e blamed Ukraine for high diesel prices,” said Keilar, citing a press conference that Trump apparently fibbed his way thought earlier on Tuesday. “Of course, we do know that those high diesel prices of late, those high gas prices of late have been from Iran.”

But viewers would not have known the link between exorbitant diesel prices and Trump’s entirely voluntary war on Iran, listening to Trump today. Trump instead laid entire blame for prices on the invaded nation of Ukraine, which is fighting for its life. And he called on Ukrainian leaders to surrender territory that Russia invaded and stole in the last few years.

“… Ukraine has to want to settle this war. Zelensky has to want to settle this war. And if he doesn't, I think it's going to be a very bad thing,” Trump told reporters. “Look, we have given tremendous amounts to Ukraine. We've got nothing back other than high diesel. We have given probably possibly more money to Ukraine than almost anybody over the years, hundreds of billions of dollars. We've gotten nothing back. And the American taxpayers are tired of it.”

Keilar’s quick debunk was effortless, particularly because the news is choked with proof that global and U.S. high diesel prices are due to a bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz and other choke points throughout the Middle East — all resulting from Trump’s war.

Trump is apparently aware of what those high prices are doing to his voter approval. On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced an $8 billion bailout for farms struggling under the fast-rising diesel prices caused by President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. But experts are quick to point out that basic math reveals that Trump’s “bribe” of angry farmers in the run-up to the midterms will do little to alleviate their plight.

But Fox News reports, the diesel situation has forced a wave of transportation companies into bankruptcy, while farmers in red states have increasingly turned on Trump. One Kansas cattle rancher speaking with the Washington Examiner, appears to know Trump’s hand in high costs, saying Trump “changed the whole dynamics of everything.”

“You know, people can’t afford to give as much for the cattle now because they’re trying to afford the trucking to get them to their final destinations,” the farmer said.

But when Trump isn’t trying to blame Ukraine for his problem, he’s trying to blame Democrats. But now 67 percent of Americans are very aware of the source of their problem, and it has everything to do with the White House.

- YouTube youtu.be

According to Bloomberg, “seven Boeing Co. 737-700 jets, acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars and meant to ramp up President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign, have barely left the ground at southwest Louisiana’s Lake Charles Regional Airport,” Bloomberg said.

“They are the fleet that was acquired this year by Kristi Noem for the Department of Homeland Security, before she was fired after spending more than $200 million on a self-promotional ad campaign and amid withering criticism from Republicans over her leadership.”

First reported in August by the New York Times, with a eye-busting purchase of $464 million, the planes are still collecting dirt and litter where they began. Each of the planes has conducted fewer than “five flights since April 2026,” reported Bloomberg, citing data from ADS-B Exchange, which tracks aircraft around the world.

“The fate of the planes is emblematic of how DHS under Noem, and with the guidance of advisor Corey Lewandowski, pursued splashy projects that have since been criticized by Democrats and Republicans for wasteful spending,” Bloomberg reports. “Some of the initiatives, including the advertising campaign that featured Noem riding a horse near Mount Rushmore, were canceled. A plan to convert warehouses into mega-immigration detention centers has largely been scrapped even after the government spent more than $1 billion acquiring the facilities.”

Even more controversially, the contract to purchase the planes brought attention to an even bigger issue with the second Trump administration beyond its wastefulness: Trump’s love of no-bid contracts awarded to people with connections to Trump or his cabinet secretaries. In this case, the company that received this contract, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, is led by a chairman who had donated to a political committee supporting the previous homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.

In March, on Noem’s final day on the job, the department acquired five jets from Daedalus Aviation. This included two Gulfstream business jets and a Boeing business jet, advertised in an online listing as featuring 17 passenger seats, a full kitchen and two bedrooms.

The purchase was originally sold as an effort to increase deportations, but Bloomberg reports the government has instead increased the pace of deportation flights using existing contractors.

John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director in the Obama administration, questioned the need for a government-owned fleet, complete with new maintenance and staffing costs. Aircraft availability, he said, has never significantly constrained ICE’s ability to conduct deportations in the first place.

“Why would you want to own your own fleet when you own all the problems?” said Sandweg.

The Department of Human Service, now run by Trump ally and former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, is looking for alternatives to use the planes, but some of the planes are not young, Bloomberg reports.

One of the 737s earmarked for conversion to fly Congressional delegations is an 18-year-old aircraft that “has operated just one flight, a loop around Lake Charles on Sept. 16, according to the ADS-B Exchange data” … and another 737 designated for upgrades is 22 years old and probably only conducted a handful of flights in May and September, according to aircraft tracking.

President Donald Trump has frequently attacked the idea of foreign countries meddling in U.S. elections, but according to one of his first-term staffers, his real feelings are more two-faced and self-serving than he lets on, and there was one moment when the truth "clicked" for him.

Miles Taylor previously worked at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump's first term, rising to the level of chief of staff before leaving in 2019. Prior to that, he first gained national recognition for an anonymous op-ed he penned for The New York Times claiming to be part of an internal White House resistance to Trump's worst impulses. Since then, he has emerged as a vocal critic of his former boss and frequently offers insights he gained from firsthand experience in the administration.

As Trump is once again attacking the integrity of U.S. elections and mused about taking over the midterm voting process, Taylor wrote in his latest piece for The i Paper that he was part of another resistance group within his first administration, one that tried to prepare for a similar assault on the 2018 midterms.

"I take the threat seriously, because I used to work for the man. And I saw the earliest signs of how he likes to influence elections," Taylor wrote. "In August 2018, I brought together the heads of the FBI, the intelligence community and my own department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), at the White House podium to warn Russia not to interfere in that year’s midterms. We were concerned they might try to meddle again."

In response to that press conference, Taylor said that Trump called it "terrible" and pressed to find out if anyone had pressured them to do it. Despite legitimate warnings about Russia interfering in the midterms, Trump later went after a different target altogether.

"Weeks later at the United Nations, he publicly accused China of trying to interfere in the midterms, but he said nothing about the country his team had actually told him was a threat: Russia," Taylor recounted.

In light of that discrepancy, Taylor said that Trump's true intentions around foreign election meddling became clear.

That’s when it clicked for me. Trump didn’t seem to mind foreign interference in American elections, if it was helpful to him," he wrote. "The Russians had backed him in 2016, and he did not seem to mind their interference in 2018. What I suspect irked him was that nations like China could use propaganda to undercut him personally, or his hand-picked candidates."

He added: "Back then, I thought the selective enforcement was outrageous. We shouldn’t let any foreign nation hack our democracy, whether or not they were aligned with the President’s political interests. Of course, it got far worse in 2020. Trump fanned the flames of baseless 'voter fraud' claims after he lost, and for the first time in the history of the United States, a President attempted to prevent the transfer of power."

A federal judge is under fire for emailing sealed court documents to about 140 people, Bloomberg Law reported Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Ada Brown, appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, is accused of misconduct for widely spreading confidential materials.

The Judicial Council for the Fifth Circuit filed an order Tuesday that revealed the extent of the information the judge shared and confirmed she was already under investigation for misconduct. The documents also included sealed court papers that were unrelated to the misconduct allegations.

“The Committee has since learned that Judge Brown sent these documents to approximately 140 judges, lawyers, and members of the press,” Tuesday’s order said, according to Bloomberg. The outlet also said it, along with other legal media outlets, received Brown's email.

When Bloomberg sought clarification, it didn't get a response email, and emails to her federal courts address came back as "undeliverable."

Brown, who serves on the Northern District of Texas’s Dallas division, faced a special committee of judges that included, Bush appointee, Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod of the Fifth Circuit, Obama appointee, Fifth Circuit Judge James Graves Jr. and Bush appointee, Chief Judge Alia Moses of the Western District of Texas.

Brown indicated she would not participate in the proceedings against her and the judges all encouraged her to reconsider. She was then asked to appear before the committee on Oct. 30 and said that she had the right to present evidence in her defense.

“The Committee implores Judge Brown to exercise these rights and comply with the Committee’s investigation,” the Tuesday order said. “If she refuses, the Committee must proceed with its obligation to file a report of its investigation, including findings and recommendations for action by the Fifth Circuit Judicial Council, without the benefit of Judge Brown’s response.”

If Brown refuses to participate, Bloomberg explained that they may ultimately be forced to expand the scope of the investigation, the order warned.

The committee ordered Brown to answer its questions about the disclosure of confidential material and the sealed court papers. It also suggested it wanted to know about an unspecified “parallel investigation” that Brown claimed she also has refused to participate in.

She must respond by Oct. 27, the order said.

Another Bloomberg Law report revealed that court documents show Brown issued almost no court orders after Aug. 10, 2026, in "protest." A recusal letter wasn't entered into a case's docket and that sparked the protest. Investigators said that she'd “abandoned her post as a federal judge” and alleged she didn't respond when asked when she planned to return to work.

Investigators also said Brown withdrew from more than 40 cases starting June 1. Sometimes she offered an explanation or cited "unusual" reasons.

President Donald Trump’s grandiose claims of voter fraud are falling apart under the weight of his own Justice Department’s figures.

The president’s administration is being asked to account for its broad allegations of fraud in California after the DOJ put forward charges on only 34 ballots said to be illegal from the nearly 94 million that have been cast in the state since 2020.

On Monday, federal prosecutors made public a statewide probe into noncitizen voting and out charges against 28 lawful permanent residents. The San Francisco Chronicle reports 23 of them are alleged to have put in 34 ballots between them in elections going back to 2020.

Put another way, that is 0.00004 percent of what was put to the vote in California’s eight statewide contests over the period, hardly the sort of numbers to back up the administration’s claims of rampant illegal voting.

The department has been at odds with the state over this. In July, the Department of Homeland Security released a preliminary review saying it had found over 190,000 possible noncitizens registered to vote in California.

By October, the figure was down to about 20,000, and the Justice Department filed suit when state officials would not comply with federal requests to root out suspected noncitizens and keep their votes off the tally.

And yet the criminal cases unsealed on Monday were limited to fewer than three dozen questionable ballots in the whole state.

The 28 defendants are U.S. residents but not citizens, so they are barred from federal elections; they face charges of false statements on naturalization papers and fraudulent registration.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter says the prosecutions make good on the administration’s demands, pointing to the 28 on the government’s list of suspects. “California refused to look at that list,” he said in a statement from the Justice Department.

Election experts are having none of it. Rick Hasen of UCLA’s election law program sees the case as a “drop in the bucket” compared to the 23 million voters on the California roll.

Hasen also pointed out that some of those charged never actually cast a ballot despite the illegal registration. The figures do nothing to prove every name on the administration’s list is a legitimate voter, but they do illustrate how few cases federal prosecutors have mustered in light of earlier estimates.

McCotter concedes some on the suspect list may in the end be shown to be American citizens, and Gov. Gavin Newsom was quick to deride that as the administration goes after access to registration records.

Federal judges have already turned down the administration’s bid for the full voter rolls on privacy and legal grounds.

For their part, California officials say the records are kept in order and will have none of Trump’s contention that the state’s elections are rife with fraud.

President Donald Trump and his legal team are scrambling to stop the BBC from calling a major surprise witness in his ongoing defamation case, and as legal expert Lisa Rubin told MS NOW, it is seemingly because of the damningly "on-point" evidence they have to share.

Late last year, Trump sued the BBC, alleging defamation after the network aired a documentary in its Panorama series prior to the 2024 election, which touched on the January 6 Capitol riots. Trump's suit claimed that the footage of his speech to supporters prior to the attacks was selectively edited to make it appear as if he had directly asked his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol building, a claim the network has vigorously fought back against.

Currently, Trump and his team are fighting in court to prevent the BBC from calling former special counsel Jack Smith into court for testimony. Discussing the ongoing case during a Tuesday appearance on MS NOW, Rubin explained that Smith, as he has strongly implied in the past, might have key evidence that could blow up the president's argument against the BBC — and expose his connection to the Capitol riots in the process.

Rubin laid out the situation when pressed by host Alicia Menendez.

"This lawsuit is sort of an unusual defamation case because what it's about is how the BBC edited together portions of the speech that Donald Trump gave at the Ellipse on January 6th," Rubin said. "And in particular, he's saying that the way that the BBC edited it gave the false impression that he directly called for violence. The BBC is saying, 'No, actually, even if the speech was edited together in a way that gave that impression, if the speech as a whole not only gave that impression, but was his intent, it was never false to begin with.'"

This, she noted, is where the evidence from Smith's extensive investigation of January 6 comes into play.

"And the greatest expert on all of that is Jack Smith," Rubin continued. "Because even though we know what his report says, he's never disclosed the evidence on which it's based. But he has said publicly that he has strong evidence that Trump knew the violence was foreseeable, that he caused it nonetheless, and then he leveraged it to try and prevent the vote that day. And so if the core question is whether the speech was false, then Jack Smith's evidence, according to the BBC, is very on point and relevant to whether or not there was a false statement."

Trump's team is attempting to argue that a legal rule precludes Smith from sharing information in court "because it was developed in the context of a grand jury." However, Rubin noted, there is another rule that allows grand jury evidence "to be discussed in other judicial proceedings."

Justice Samuel Alito’s new book has exposed a contradiction in his judicial philosophy: Alito calls himself an originalist, but even some conservative reviewers see that his decisions are driven more by politics than principles.

On Tuesday, Vox’s Ian Millhiser wrote that the backlash against Alito's book is a bombshell for the right, which now appears to realize that the U.S. Supreme Court justice has been less than candid when it comes to his originalism arguments.

Alito’s book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, is largely a collection of his previously delivered speeches. But reviews by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, The Washington Post's Jason Willick and libertarian writer Damon Root found the book puzzling given the title and the justice's deviation from practice.

Originalism is the idea that cases should follow the strict interpretation of the Constitution and words must be based off of their original public meaning at the time the case was presented or laws were written. Conservatives have used it to justify preventing judges from substituting personal preferences for the law. But the conservatives who reviewed Alito's book argue that the justice frequently appears to choose his political beliefs first and then find a justification in originalism after the fact.

Root looked at Alito's comments on the gun rights case McDonald v. Chicago (2010). He explained that the court faced two questions: first, whether the Second Amendment applied against state and local governments as it does against the federal government. Second, if the court finds that it applies against the states, how should it be applied?

"The historical evidence in the case all pointed in the same direction: The most thoroughly and consistently originalist way of applying the Second Amendment against the states was via the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment," wrote Root for Reason.

Yet, Alito rejected that originalist argument. Evidently, he still rejects it.

"To make his current case, Alito has enlisted the aid of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who vocally opposed the Privileges or Immunities Clause argument during the McDonald proceedings. 'Why did Scalia, a former law professor, say that?' Alito wrote in the Journal. 'Because accepting the Privileges or Immunities argument would have opened a can of worms. Libertarians, social conservatives, progressives, socialists and others could all make a pitch for whatever rights they favored,'" Root quoted.

To be fair, Root explained, any judicial decision can open a can of worms. "If the Constitution demands that the government stop acting in a certain way, why should a self-professed originalist put his fears about opening a can of worms ahead of his judicial duty to follow the constitutional text where it leads?" asked Root.

As Millhiser notes, Alito argues that originalism must produce “good results” to remain influential. Willick asked the obvious question in his review: good according to whom? The concern is that Alito’s standard essentially allows his political preferences to determine when originalism deserves to be followed and when he can ignore it.

Another case that Millhiser cited was one over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau funding. Alito went off on a historic rant about historical conflicts between Parliament and the English monarchy. Justice Clarence Thomas criticized it for Alito talking a good game about history, but not directly connecting it to the U.S. Constitution.

As Millhiser explains it, this is Alito's example of historical storytelling twisted to claim originalist analysis.

Then there's the matter of how Alito justifies opposing something during President Barack Obama's administration but supporting it during President Donald Trump's administration. In fact, as Goldsmith explained in his analysis, Alito has supported the Trump administration in every important second-term case, including dissenting in its major defeats. For Obama, it was not similar.

As Millhiser notes, originalism gives justices a rationale for overturning precedents by claiming earlier decisions somehow misunderstood the Constitution’s original meaning. But that makes the method politically useful without guaranteeing consistent application.

It prompted him to wonder if Republicans may ultimately abandon originalism entirely so that they can more explicitly adopt more ideological judging or personal loyalty to Trump.