A whistleblower is claiming that FBI Director Kash Patel’s frequent use of one of the agency’s two jets has led to the delay of a high-profile murder probe.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday revealed he had received new whistleblower disclosures related to his investigations into Patel’s use of FBI aircraft for personal travel, and he said they showed Patel’s decisions regarding the use of FBI planes had delayed investigations not only into the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk but also the November 2025 mass shooting at Brown University.

In the case of Kirk, Durbin said that the FBI shooting reconstruction team’s deployment to Utah “was delayed by at least a day because of a bureau plane and pilot shortage caused by the director’s personal flights.”

Durbin said that he also received information showing how Patel bungled the aftermath of the Brown shooting by putting the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) on standby to respond to the incident.

“The director’s decision caused immediate confusion,” Durbin said, “because that order was not communicated to HRT; it upended the responsibility typically assigned to the local field office closest to the incident in question—in this case Boston or New York City—to provide immediate support; and it froze the aircraft’s usage by any other FBI team until the director removed the hold.”

Durbin then said that the whistleblower described how his team “had to drive from Quantico, Virginia to Providence, Rhode Island overnight during a winter storm to reach the scene by 9:00 am the following morning to immediately process evidence.”

Durbin noted he received this information shortly after Patel was seen chugging down a beer in the locker room of the gold medal-winning US men’s Olympic hockey team on Sunday, after the director once again used an FBI plane to fly to Milan, Italy.

The Democratic senator said that Patel’s trip to Italy could have seriously hampered the FBI’s ability to investigate what may have been an assassination attempt on President Donald Trump.

“It also cannot be ignored that the director’s latest personal jaunt occurred on the same weekend an armed intruder attempted to breach President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence,” Durbin explained. “The man was allegedly carrying a gas can and a shotgun, and he was killed on the scene by law enforcement.”

Durbin concluded by saying that “the FBI cannot afford to have its resources further stretched by a director who views its staff and aircraft as a means to support his jet-setting lifestyle.”

MS NOW reported that an FBI spokesperson has “disputed” the whistleblower’s claims that Patel’s decisions had caused delays to investigations, but added that they need to “check into the matter more deeply to gather information.”

Now that the US Supreme Court has ruled President Donald Trump levied illegal tariffs on US businesses and consumers for more than a year, progressive Democrats are escalating demands that Americans get their money back.

Days after the Supreme Court shut down Trump’s ability to unilaterally enact tariffs through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) said on Tuesday that during the State of the Union address, Trump should announce refunds for Americans he unlawfully taxed.

“Americans don’t need a rambling, two hour lecture from Trump,” Casar wrote in a social media post. “We need our money back. He owes us: $1,700 in illegal tariffs per family; $4 billion he’s profited off the presidency; $1 trillion he stole in tax breaks for the ultra-rich. Spare us the speech. Pay up or shut up.”

Casar’s demands for tariff refunds aren’t isolated.

Politico reported on Monday that Democrats have pounced on the Supreme Court ruling to deliver a simple message to voters: Trump wrongfully took your money and should return it.

Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), who along with Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-Ore.) introduced legislation mandating tariff refunds on Friday, accused Trump of outright thievery.

“When someone takes money that wasn’t authorized and does it in a way that harms you,” Horsford told Politico, “they’ve stolen from you, and that is what the Trump administration has done for the last year.”

Horsford’s rhetoric echoed a statement made by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who said in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling last week that Trump “illegally stole your money” and “should give it back to you” instead of trying to cook up new ways to slap tariffs on imported goods.

Groundwork Collaborative on Tuesday previewed Trump’s State of the Union speech by noting the president has totally failed to keep his promise to bring down prices, adding that his tariffs “cost the average working family nearly $1,200 last year.”

“No matter what Trump says in the upcoming State of the Union address,” Groundwork Collaborative said, “it won’t change the fact that working families know that the president and his lackeys in Congress alone bear responsibility for painfully high prices and a dragging economy.”

Although the Supreme Court clipped Trump’s power to levy tariffs via the IEEPA, he has since announced plans to issue a 15% global tariff using his authority under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to levy tariffs to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits with foreign nations.

However, as a recent analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute explained, any tariffs enacted through Section 122 expire after 150 days without authorization from Congress, which in theory could put vulnerable congressional Republicans on the spot to vote for or against the president’s signature economic policy this summer right before the 2026 midterm elections.

President Donald Trump defiantly vowed to continue slapping tariffs on imported goods on Friday after the US Supreme Court overturned the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs he implemented last year.

In a press conference held hours after the Supreme Court ruled against the president’s tariff regime, Trump said that he had other tools at his disposal that allowed him to hit foreign products with taxes.

Among other things, Trump said he was going to issue a 10% global tariff using his authority under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 that allows the president to levy tariffs to address “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits with foreign nations.

However, as a Friday analysis by the libertarian Cato Institute explains, any tariffs enacted through Section 122 expire after 150 days without authorization from Congress, which in theory could put vulnerable congressional Republicans on the spot to vote for or against the president’s signature policy this summer right before the 2026 midterm elections.

The president’s decision to plow ahead with his politically unpopular tariffs drew immediate criticism from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who said during an interview with MS NOW that Trump was creating even more economic uncertainty.

“What he’s done is just doubled down and tried to make it worse,” Klobuchar explained, “which, of course, is going to create more cost and chaos for the American people.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman also predicted more chaos in the months to come from Trump’s trade policies, particularly when it comes to businesses that will now lobby to get back the money illegally seized from them by the president’s unconstitutional tariff regime.

Writing on his Substack, Krugman argued that Trump finding alternative means to levy tariffs would not “obviate the need to refund the tariffs already collected,” because “if you seized money without constitutional authority, finding other revenue sources going forward doesn’t make the original seizure legal.”

David Frum, staff writer at The Atlantic, predicted that the coming lawsuits aimed at getting refunds for the illegal tariffs would be a massive mess.

“The post-tariff litigation is going to be nightmarish,” he wrote on social media. “Wrongfully taxed plaintiffs will now sue for return of their illegally taken money. Can their customers then sue for a portion of the higher prices caused by the wrongful taxes? More Trump chaos.”

However, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent downplayed the possibility of American businesses and consumers getting refunded for the tariffs.

While speaking at the Economic Club of Dallas on Friday, Bessent was asked if he expected a “food fight” for the $175 billion in tariff revenues that government has illegally collected since April.

“I’ve got a feeling the American people won’t see it,” Bessent said of the tariff money.

However, some Democrats indicated that they were not simply going to let the administration getting away with money they unlawfully confiscated from US businesses and consumers.

“Donald Trump illegally stole your money,” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “He should give it back to you. Instead Trump is scheming up new ways to force Americans to pay even more.”

Democrats on the US House Ways and Means Committee wrote that “Trump does not want to refund the money he illegally stole from you,” vowing the party “won’t stop fighting to get your money back.”

Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote Trump a letter after the Supreme Court ruling demanding that the president provide every family in his state a $1,700 refund for the tariffs, which he said “wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof.”

The US Supreme Court on Friday ruled that President Donald Trump exceeded his authority when he invoked an emergency law to impose sweeping global tariffs, sparking a disastrous trade war and burdening American consumers and businesses with higher costs.

The 6-3 decision, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, states that “nothing” in the text of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) “enables the president to unilaterally impose tariffs.”

“And needless to say,” Roberts wrote, “without statutory authority, the president’s tariffs cannot stand.” Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Samuel Alito dissented in the case, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump.

The ruling deals a massive blow to Trump’s tariff regime, which he placed at the center of his economic policy agenda despite warnings that the sweeping import taxes would drive up costs for US consumers and businesses—which is precisely what happened.

An analysis released by congressional Democrats just after the Supreme Court handed down its ruling estimated that the average US family has paid more than $1,700 in tariff costs since the start of Trump’s second White House term. While businesses may be eligible for tariff refunds in the wake of the high court’s decision, it’s far from clear that consumers who paid higher costs for groceries and other goods affected by the levies will have any such recourse.

The Supreme Court’s decision does not directly address the issue of refunds for tariff costs, which tripled for midsize US companies last year.

“Any consumer looking for relief from tariff-driven price hikes did not find it at the Supreme Court today,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative. “The economic damage Trump has already done to business investment, manufacturing, and working families’ budgets will linger for years to come.”

“Refunds for impacted businesses will take months or even years to process, and there is little reason to believe companies will pass those savings on to consumers,” Jacquez added. “Trump must set aside his erratic tariff policy and instead pursue a trade agenda that protects workers, supports manufacturers, and doesn’t punish consumers.”

“Trump will try to do this again another way, because he is intent on continuing his unhinged economic sabotage.”

Most of the tariffs Trump has imposed during his second term will be impacted by the Supreme Court’s decision. NBC News noted that the decision “upends his tariffs in two categories. One is country-by-country or ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, which range from 34% for China to a 10% baseline for the rest of the world.”

“The other is a 25% tariff Trump imposed on some goods from Canada, China, and Mexico for what the administration said was their failure to curb the flow of fentanyl,” the outlet added.

On top of driving up costs for American consumers and businesses, Trump’s tariffs failed to make a dent in the US trade deficit and did not stop the loss of manufacturing jobs, which declined by an estimated 108,000 during the president’s first year back in the White House.

Fearing a negative Supreme Court ruling, Trump administration officials have reportedly been exploring alternatives to the IEEPA, prompting concerns that the president could swiftly pursue similar tariffs under a different authority.

“This decision is unlikely to alter US tariff rates or policies much because there are other statutes that could provide broad authority for Trump to impose tariffs,” said Lori Wallach, director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project.

“In the immediate term, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 explicitly authorizes a president to impose tariffs up to 15% for up to 150 days on any and all countries related to ‘large and serious’ balance of payments issues, which relates to the huge chronic US trade deficit,” Wallach observed. “Section 122 does not require investigations or impose other procedural limits.”

US Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision but warned that “Trump will try to do this again another way, because he is intent on continuing his unhinged economic sabotage.”

Rep. Ro Khanna on Wednesday demanded action from both the Trump administration and US Congress after the United Nations Human Rights Council said it found evidence of a potential “global criminal enterprise” in the US government’s files related to the investigation of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In a video posted on social media, Khanna (D-Calif.) issued a series of demands in the wake of the UN council’s Tuesday declaration that the actions of Epstein and his associates “may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.”

First, Khanna said that the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) must assemble a special prosecution committee to build criminal cases against Epstein associates who are alleged to have participated in the trafficking of underage girls.

He then demanded that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) set up a congressional select committee to have hearings where “every person who went” to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean where he trafficked girls is forced to testify.

Finally, Khanna said that the DOJ must release the remaining Epstein files that are still under wraps, without any redactions for names of the “predators” within.

Experts on the UN Human Rights Council said that the evidence contained in the Epstein files is “suggestive of the existence of a global criminal enterprise” that has “shocked the conscience of humanity and raised terrifying implications of the level of impunity for such crimes.”

The experts added that “so grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.”

Khanna and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) last year authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated that the DOJ publish all materials related to the FBI’s investigation into Epstein and his associates, with redactions made only to protect the identities of the victims.

Despite this law, the DOJ proceeded to release files that revealed victims’ identities, while also blacking out names of alleged abusers.

Critics are demanding the censure and even expulsion of a Republican US congressman after his latest bigoted remarks against Muslims.

The firestorm began on Sunday when Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) responded to a sarcastic social media post by Palestinian American activist Nerdeen Kiswani, who jokingly suggested that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election meant that “NYC is coming to Islam,” and it was time to consider banning dogs as pets because “like we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”

“If they force us to choose,” Fine wrote, “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

Kiswani insisted that her post was not meant to be taken at all seriously, and was rather her attempt to satirize some Americans’ fears about having a Muslim elected to lead the largest US city.

“If Americans cared as much about abused children as they do about posts joking about dogs,” she wrote, “we might actually be facing a national reckoning. Instead watching some of the same politicians who resisted transparency around the Epstein files discover their outrage over this is telling.”

Many Democratic lawmakers were quick to condemn Fine for suggesting that the US expel Muslims.

“We must call this what it is. Disgusting bigotry,” wrote Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). “Fine must be censured. It’s about morality and decency, not politics.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) joined Khanna’s call to censure Fine.

“This is genuinely one of the most disgusting statements I have ever seen issued by an American official,” she wrote. “It should not stop shocking us that the Republican Party openly embraces this. Fine should be censured and stripped of committees. To ignore this is to accept and normalize it.”

Rep. Rob Menendez (D-NJ) argued that Fine’s statement “is what it looks like when Islamophobia and outrage are the only two items on your political agenda,” and demanded that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) issue a formal condemnation.

Jennifer Jenkins, a Democrat running against Fine in Florida’s 6th Congressional District, said that censuring the Republican lawmaker was not enough.

“Randy Fine has spent years spewing hate: attacking entire faiths, calling for violence, targeting kids and families, and dehumanizing Americans,” she wrote. “He’s only escalated. Congress must act now and expel Randy Fine immediately.”

Fine appears undeterred by the condemnation he’s received, appearing on Newsmax Tuesday morning to push false claims about Democrats wanting to ban pet dogs.

“People should know Democrats like [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] are saying ‘we are going to get rid of your dogs,’” Fine falsely claimed. “Americans need to keep that in mind when they go and vote in November.”

Two US immigration enforcement officers are now under federal investigation after it was revealed that they seem to have lied about the circumstances that led up to the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant last month.

As reported by Politico on Friday, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons acknowledged that two federal officers appear “to have made untruthful statements” about a confrontation in Minneapolis in January that culminated in one of the officers shooting Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg.

The officers claimed that Sosa-Celis and another Venezuelan immigrant, Alfredo Aljorna, assaulted them with a broom and a shovel, which forced one of the officers to open fire in self-defense.

While the two men had been charged with assaulting the officers in the wake of the shooting, charges against them were abruptly dismissed on Thursday when prosecutors revealed that “newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations” made under oath by the officers.

Lyons said that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is now investigating the two officers, who have been placed on administrative leave until the probe concludes.

US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last month defended the officers and parroted their claims about the shooting.

“What we saw last night in Minneapolis was an attempted murder of federal law enforcement,” Noem claimed. “Our officer was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels and the handles of brooms. Fearing for his life, the officer fired a defensive shot.”

Noem has come under fire in recent weeks for lying about shootings involving federal immigration officials, such as when she falsely claimed that slain Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was aiming “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement” while filming officers’ activities.

In reality, video footage showed Pretti never drew his handgun during his deadly confrontation with federal immigration officers, while also clearly showing that officers disarmed him before they opened fire.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that the newly uncovered evidence in Sosa-Celis’ case showed that the officer not only didn’t discharge his weapon in self-defense, but he “fired his gun through a closed door, striking the people inside.”

The Minnesota House of Representatives Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Caucus accused federal immigration agents of systematically lying to cover up unjustified shootings.

“They’re hiding evidence, stifling investigations, and fabricating information,” wrote the Minnesota House DFL on social media. “They’re lying to your face. We won’t let them get away with it—Minnesotans deserve justice.”

US Rep. Rob Menedez (D-NJ) said that lying appears to be endemic in the entire Trump administration.

“The Trump administration has consistently lied about ICE’s violent acts toward Americans and the abuses that this agency perpetuates every day,” he wrote. “They aren’t afraid to lie about members of Congress, and they certainly aren’t afraid to lie about any American they have killed, shot, or assaulted. This agency cannot continue to exist.”

A pair of experts warned this week that President Donald Trump is clearly telegraphing his intention to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections.

Stephen Richer, former recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, said during an interview with The Atlantic published Wednesday that he’s grown worried that “something truly spectacular is going to happen in which our 2026 midterm elections are not administered like past elections have been.”

When asked to flesh out how Trump could potentially rig the upcoming elections, Richer said it was unlikely that he would deploy US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to polling places across the country, if for no other reason than he lacks the manpower to accomplish such an operation.

However, Richer did express concern about the president’s ability to muddy waters in tight races and put pressure on his Republican allies to refuse to seat Democratic winners when he is claiming there are disputes about the results.

“Where I think President Trump is most potent is still in the post-election procedures,” he explained, “still in sowing doubt in the minds of enough Americans that they don’t think the elections are legitimate and, therefore... the Congress doesn’t have to seat its new members. That’s certainly a popular theory that’s floating about: that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), the outgoing speaker, will choose not to seat the new members, because they’re in allegedly disputed elections.”

Richer argued that California could be particularly vulnerable to this, since the state infamously takes so long to finish tallying its votes.

In a New York Times editorial published Thursday, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program, argued that Trump’s “campaign to rig our elections is well underway,” and he pointed to the president’s mass pardon last year of rioters who violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 as the beginning of his election subversion campaign.

“We have every reason to expect more actions like these in the coming months,” wrote Morales-Doyle. “A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump reiterated his threats to prosecute election officials who ran the 2020 election. Just days later, FBI agents seized ballots and election records from 2020 in Fulton County, Georgia.”

However, Morales-Doyle also said there was reason to believe that the American system can withstand the president’s assault on its election integrity, and he gave a nod toward several efforts across the country to fight back, including states resisting Trump’s demands to hand over their voter rolls and Democrats refusing to let new voter suppression legislation pass through Congress.

“We are already seeing how effective people can be in pushing back,” he concluded, “whether on the streets of Minneapolis or at town halls hosted by their representatives in Congress. It will be incumbent on all of us—election officials, advocates, state law enforcement, and voters—to see the administration’s efforts for what they are and to fight back.”

Hours after the Republican Party suffered an upset defeat in a special election in a deep-red district in Texas, President Donald Trump falsely claimed he had nothing to do with the race.

While speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Sunday, Trump was asked what he made of the GOP losing a Texas state senate election in a district that he carried by 17 percentage points in 2024.

“I’m not involved in that, that’s a local Texas race,” Trump replied.

In fact, Trump endorsed losing Republican candidate Leigh Wambsganss on three separate occasions in just the last three days, including a Saturday post on Truth Social where he called her “a phenomenal Candidate” and “an incredible supporter of our Movement to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Trump’s attempt to distance himself from someone whom he enthusiastically endorsed just one day ago elicited instant ridicule from many of his critics on social media.

“Two days ago, the president used his social media platform to endorse this ‘phenomenal candidate’ and to urge ‘all America First Patriots’ in the district to get out and vote for her,” remarked Princeton historian Kevin Kruse. “Today, he says he doesn’t know anything about it and had nothing to do with it. He’s lying or demented or both.”

Zak Williams, a political consultant at Zenith Strategies and a native Texan, wrote that Trump was “intimately involved” in the campaign, noting that Republicans outspent Democrats in the race by a margin of 10 to 1.

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who left the GOP over his disgust with Trump, expressed astonishment at the president’s blatant dishonesty.

“He’s such a horrible person,” wrote Walsh. “And such a dishonest person. Yes, he was involved in that race. He endorsed the losing candidate, and she lost 100% because of him. She lost 100% because of this past year of his chaos, his cruelty, and his incompetence. Her loss was a total rejection of him.”

Journalist James Barragán of TX Capital Tonight, argued that the Wambsganss loss calls into question just how effective Trump’s endorsements will be in moving voters in the 2026 midterm elections.

“President Trump says he’s ‘not involved’ in SD 9 race where his endorsed candidate (who he boosted multiple times in the runup) lost a +17 Trump district,” wrote Barragán. “He’s either not being truthful or it makes you question how much stock people should put into his social media endorsements.”

A bombshell Saturday report from the Wall Street Journal revealed that a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family secretly backed a massive $500 million investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture months before the Trump administration gave the United Arab Emirates access to highly sensitive artificial intelligence chip technology.

According to the Journal’s sources, lieutenants of Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a deal in early 2025 to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the startup founded by members of the Trump family and the family of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.

Documents reviewed by the Journal showed that the buyers in the deal agreed to “pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities,” while “at least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with” the Witkoff family.

Weeks after green lighting the investment into the Trump crypto venture, Tahnoon met directly with President Donald Trump and Witkoff in the White House, where he reportedly expressed interest in working with the US on AI-related technology.

Two months after this, the Journal noted, “the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”

Tahnoon in the past had tried to get US officials to give the UAE access to the chips, but was rebuffed on concerns that the cutting-edge technology could be passed along to top US geopolitical rival China, wrote the Journal.

Many observers expressed shock at the Journal’s report, with some critics saying that it showed Trump and his associates were engaging in a criminal bribery scheme.

“This was a bribe,” wrote Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, in a social media post. “UAE royals gave the Trump family $500 million, and Trump, in his presidential capacity, gave them access to tightly guarded American AI chips. The most powerful person on the planet, also happens to be the most shamelessly corrupt.”

Jesse Eisinger, reporter and editor at ProPublica, argued that the Abu Dhabi investment into the Trump cypto firm “should rank among the greatest US scandals ever.”

Democratic strategist David Axelrod also said that the scope of the Trump crypto investment scandal was historic in nature.

“In any other time or presidency, this story... would be an earthquake of a scandal,” he wrote. “The size, scope and implications of it are unprecedented and mind-boggling.”

Tommy Vietor, co-host of “Pod Save America,” struggled to wrap his head around the scale of corruption on display.

“How do you add up the cost of corruption this massive?” he wondered. “It’s not just that Trump is selling advanced AI tech to the highest bidder, national security be damned. Its that he’s tapped that doofus Steve Witkoff as an international emissary so his son Zach Witkoff can mop up bribes.”

Former Rep. Tom Malinkowski (D-NJ) warned the Trump and his associates that they could wind up paying a severe price for their deal with the UAE.

“If a future administration finds that such payments to the Trump family were acts of corruption,” he wrote, “these people could be sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act, and the assets in the US could potentially be frozen.”

Critics have weighed in on Amazon MGM Studios’ documentary about first lady Melania Trump, and their verdicts are overwhelmingly negative.

According to review aggregation website Metacritic, Melania—which Amazon paid $40 million to acquire and $35 million to market—so far has received a collective score of just 6 out of 100 from critics, which indicates “overwhelming dislike.”

Similarly, Melania scores a mere 6% on Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomameter,” indicating that 94% of reviews for the movie so far have been negative.

One particularly brutal review came from Nick Hilton, film critic for the Independent, who said that the first lady came off in the film as “a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness” who leads a “vulgar, gilded lifestyle.”

Hilton added that the film is so terrible that it fails even at being effective propaganda and is likely to be remembered as “a striking artifact... of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly.”

The Guardian’s Xan Brooks delivered a similarly scathing assessment, declaring the film “dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing.”

“It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality,” Brooks elaborated. “I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.”

Donald Clarke of the Irish Times also discussed the film’s failure as a piece of propaganda, and he compared it unfavorably to the work of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.

“Melania... appears keener on inducing narcolepsy in its viewers than energizing them into massed marching,” he wrote. “Triumph of the Dull, perhaps.”

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman argued that the Melania documentary is utterly devoid of anything approaching dramatic stakes, which results in the film suffering from “staggering inertia.”

“Mostly it’s inert,” Gleiberman wrote of the film. “It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called ‘Day of the Living Tradwife.’”

Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter found that the movie mostly exposes Melania Trump is an empty vessel without a single original thought or insight, instead deploying “an endless number of inspirational phrases seemingly cribbed from self-help books.”

Kevin Fallon of the Daily Beast described Melania as “an unbelievable abomination of filmmaking” that reaches “a level of insipid propaganda that almost resists review.”

“It’s so expected,” Fallon added, “and utterly pointless.”

xperts are warning that the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown in Minnesota could quickly get out of hand and could even result in a second US civil war.

Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.

“In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s National Guard,” Finkelstein explained. “When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces.”

Finkelstein noted that such a scenario is alarmingly close to what’s currently going on in Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Walz has placed his state’s National Guard on standby and President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would give him broad powers to deploy the military on US soil.

The simulation also projected that the judiciary would be of little help to any state that found itself in the president’s crosshairs.

“We concluded that in a fast-moving emergency of this magnitude, courts would probably be unable or unwilling to intervene in time, leaving state officials without meaningful judicial relief,” Finkelstein explained. “State officials might file emergency motions to enjoin the use of federal troops, but judges would either fail to respond quickly enough or decline to rule on what they view as a ‘political question,’ leaving the conflict unresolved.”

Steve Saideman, a political scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, argued that the situation now is even more dire than the one Finkelstein and her colleagues imagined in their simulation.

In a post on Bluesky, Saideman argued that the US is “hours or days away from civil war.”

“This might sound extreme,” he acknowledged, “but if Walz has the Minnesota National Guard blocking ICE operations, the usual response of the federal government to governors using National Guard against feds is to call out the Army... What happens if the Army confronts Minnesota National Guard? We have no idea. But one real possibility is: bam.”

Saideman added that, given the nonstop chaos of Trump’s presidency, it’s only a matter of time before it eventually boils over into real civil conflict.

“If we keep having these crises, one of them is going to get really ugly,” he said. “Crises under Trump are street cars—there is always another one coming along. We have gotten lucky thus far, but if a citizen shoots at ICE or if the Minnesota National Guard tussles with ICE, things may escalate very quickly.”

In a New York Times column published on Monday, Lydia Polgreen argued it was no longer a stretch to equate what is going on in Minnesota with a war being waged by the federal government against one of its own states.

“It might not yet be a civil war, but what the White House has called Operation Metro Surge is definitely not just—or even primarily—an immigration enforcement operation,” wrote Polgreen. “It is an occupation designed to punish and terrorize anyone who dares defy this incursion and, by extension, Trump’s power to wield limitless force against any enemy he wishes.”

President Donald Trump has long insisted, in the face of decades of research by economists, that foreign producers are the only ones who are paying for his tariffs on imported goods.

However, a major new study released Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, an economic think tank based in Germany, shows that US businesses and consumers are shouldering the burden for the vast majority of Trump’s tariffs.

After examining more than 25 million shipment records of goods imported to the US last year, the institute found that foreign exporters only absorbed 4% of the $200 billion in tariff payments, with the remaining 96% being passed on to US importers and consumers.

“This finding has profound implications,” the study explains. “If foreign exporters do not reduce their prices in response to tariffs, then the entire burden of the tariff falls on US buyers. The tariff functions not as a tax on foreign producers, but as a consumption tax on Americans. Every dollar of tariff revenue represents a dollar extracted from American businesses and households.”

The study identifies several factors to explain why exporters did not slash their prices to remain competitive in the lucrative US market, including exporters shifting their sales to other markets where they will not face such high tariffs; firms not being able to shoulder the high price cut that would be needed to overcome the tariff rates set by the president; and companies not wanting to give Trump an incentive for further tariffs by rewarding US consumers with lower prices.

Julian Hinz, research director at the Kiel Institute and an author of the study, described the Trump tariffs as an “own goal” that has harmed Americans far more than it has harmed foreigners.

“The claim that foreign countries pay these tariffs is a myth,” explained Hinz. “The data show the opposite: Americans are footing the bill.”

The Kiel Institute study came out two days after Trump vowed to slap even more tariffs on European countries opposed to his efforts to take over Greenland.

In an analysis published Monday, economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) said that the latest Trump tariffs on Europe amounted to a “$75 billion tax increase” in an attempt to fulfill the president’s “demented dreams” of taking over the self-governing Danish territory.

“Well over 90% of the cost of a Trump tariff is borne by consumers or importers in the United States, not by the exporting countries,” Baker contended. “When Trump starts yelling ‘tariff, tariff, tariff,’ he is yelling ‘tax, tax, tax,’ and we’re the ones paying it. And $75 billion is not trivial. It’s 1% of the budget, more than twice the cost of the enhanced premiums for Obamacare policies that Trump says we can’t afford.”

An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is “in turmoil” one year into Trump’s second term, resulting in a customer service system that has “deteriorated.”

The chaos at the SSA started in February when the Trump administration announced plans to lay off 7,000 SSA employees, or roughly 12% of the total workforce.

This set off a cascade of events that the Post writes has left the agency with “record backlogs that have delayed basic services to millions of customers,” as the remaining SSA workforce has “struggled to respond to up to 6 million pending cases in its processing centers and 12 million transactions in its field offices.”

The most immediate consequence of the staffing cuts was that call wait times for Social Security beneficiaries surged to an average of roughly two-and-a-half hours, which forced the agency to pull workers employed in other divisions in the department off their jobs.

However, the Post‘s sources said these employees “were thrown in with minimal training... and found themselves unable to answer much beyond basic questions.”

One longtime SSA employee told the Post that management at the agency “offered minimal training and basically threw [transferred employees] in to sink or swim.”

Although the administration has succeeded in getting call hold times down from their peaks, shuffling so many employees out of their original positions has damaged the SSA in other areas, the Post revealed.

Jordan Harwell, a Montana field office employee who is president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 4012, said that workers in his office no longer have the same time they used to have to process pay stubs, disability claims, and appointment requests because they are constantly manning the phones.

An anonymous employee in an Indiana field office told the Post that she has similarly had to let other work pile up as the administration has emphasized answering phones over everything else.

Among other things, reported the Post, she now has less time to handle “calls from people asking about decisions in their cases, claims filed online, and anyone who tries to submit forms to Social Security—like proof of marriage—through snail mail.”

Also hampering the SSA’s work have been new regulations put in place by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that bar beneficiaries from making changes to their direct deposit information over the phone, instead requiring them to either appear in person at a field office or go online.

The Indiana SSA worker told the Post of a recent case involving a 75-year-old man who recently suffered a major stroke that left him unable to drive to the local field office to verify information needed to change his banking information. The man also said he did not have access to a computer to help him change the information online.

“I had to sit there on the phone and tell this guy, ‘You have to find someone to come in... or, do you have a relative with a computer who can help you or something like that?’” the employee said. “He was just like, ‘No, no, no.’”

Social Security was a regular target for Musk during his tenure working for the Trump administration, and he repeatedly made baseless claims that the entire program was riddled with fraud, even referring to it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

Top Trump White House aide Stephen Miller on Friday elicited disgust after he said that a beloved Christmas television special reminded him of his own personal animus toward immigrants.

Miller, often seen as the architect of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy, revealed in a post on X that he and his children had just watched “Christmas with The Martins and The Sinatras,” a one-off 1967 TV holiday special that featured singers Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.

Miller then quickly pivoted from that to once again bash immigrants who come to the US.

“Imagine watching that,” Miller wrote, “and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.”

As Rolling Stone politics reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez pointed out in response, both Martin and Sinatra both had parents who were first-generation Italian immigrants.

“Dean Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti and gave himself a stage name because of braindead xenophobes like Stephen,” McCann Ramírez observed. “Sinatra was also a child of Italian immigrants. Imagine watching them and thinking immigrants didn’t build the culture you fetishize today.”

A similar point was made by civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill in a post on Bluesky.

“Imagine watching Sinatra, son of Dolly and Antonini born in Genoa and Sicily, respectively,” she wrote, “and Martin, son of Gaetano and Angela, born in Montesilvano, Italy and Ohio respectively... and crusading against the value of children of immigrants to the US.”

Journalist and author Jeff Yang added some historical context to Miller’s remarks by noting that Italian immigrants in the early and middle decades of the 20th century faced many of the same stereotypes that Miller and his political allies ascribe to immigrants from Latin America.

“A reminder,” Yang wrote, while also posting old cartoons that featured racist depictions of Italians, “that Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra’s parents emigrated here during a period when Italians were considered to be a genetically inferior and criminal-minded underclass that Stephen Miller’s racist predecessors said should be excluded from America.”

Yang added that Frank Sinatra’s mother “ran an underground free abortion clinic, chained herself to a fence to fight for women’s suffrage, and was an extremely influential organizer for the Democratic Party.”

Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse promoted Yang’s thread that demonstrated Miller’s apparent ignorance of Dean and Sinatra’s family histories, and said it showed the Trump adviser is “a horrible racist in the sense that he is actually not that good at being racist.”

Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum, managed to find an upside to Miller’s holiday-themed anti-immigrant rant.

“The one silver lining in all this sickness is that one day your children will despise you as much as most of America already does,” he commented.

Film producer Franklin Leonard was even more succinct in his response to Miller.

“Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra would hate Stephen Miller and his politics,” he wrote.

Even as US beef prices have continued to surge, American cattle ranchers have come under increased financial pressure—and a new report from More Perfect Union claims that this is due in part to industry consolidation in the meat-packing industry.

Bill Bullard, the CEO of the trade association R-CALF USA, explained to More Perfect Union that cattle ranchers are essentially at the bottom of the pyramid in the beef-producing process, while the top is occupied by “four meat packers controlling 80% of the market.”

“It’s there that the meat packers are able to exert their market power in order to leverage down the price that the cattle feeder receives for the animals,” Bullard said.

To illustrate the impact this has had on farmers, Bullard pointed out that cattle producers in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef, whereas four decades later they were receiving just 37 cents for every dollar.

“That allocation has flipped on its head because the marketplace is fundamentally broken,” Bullard told More Perfect Union.

Angela Huffman, president of Farm Action, recently highlighted the role played by the four big meatpacking companies—Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS—in hurting US ranchers.

Writing on her Substack page earlier this month, Huffman zeroed in on Tyson’s recent decision to close one of its meatpacking plants in Lexington, Nebraska to demonstrate the outsize power that big corporations have over the US food supply.

The Lexington plant employs more than 3,000 people and is capable of processing 5,000 head of cattle a day, and its closure is expected to both devastate the local economy and have a major impact on US ranchers throughout the region.

Huffman noted a report from the Associated Press estimating that the Lexington plant’s closure, combined with projected job cuts at a Tyson plant in Amarillo, Texas, could cut national beef processing capacity by up to 9%.

“Ranchers were already dealing with high costs, drought, and years of uneven prices,” Huffman wrote. “Now they face even less competition for their cattle. When there are fewer packers active in the market, ranchers have less bargaining power, and cattle prices fall even as beef prices in grocery stores stay near record highs.”

Dan Osborn, an independent US Senate candidate running in Nebraska, has made the dangers of corporate consolidation a central theme of his campaign, and on Monday he released a video explaining why he spends so much time talking about monopolies, particularly in the agricultural industry.

“If you’re a farmer, your inputs, your seed, your chemicals, you have to buy from monopolies,” he said. “Sygenta, Chinese-owned company you’ve got to buy your seed from, they control and manipulate that market. And then when your production’s over and you’re selling it, you’re selling it to monopolies as well.”

Osborn said that the trend of industry consolidation wasn’t just limited to agriculture, but is now moving forward with major railroad and media mergers.

“We need to create an economic environment in this country that favors competition,” he said. “That’s what a free market is. A free market isn’t three or four big people or big corporations controlling everything.”

The US Department of Justice on Tuesday released a new batch of documents related to the criminal investigation of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—along with a disclaimer aimed at exonerating President Donald Trump, who is mentioned numerous times in the latest disclosures.

In a message posted on X, the DOJ asserted that some of the latest documents “contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election.”

The DOJ insisted that “the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”

Among the latest batch of documents released by the DOJ was a letter purportedly written by Epstein in prison to fellow convicted sex offender Larry Nassar in which he claimed that Trump “shares our love of young, nubile girls.”

The existence of this letter was reported by the Associated Press in 2023, although its contents were not known at the time. According to MeidasTouch, investigators who found the letter submitted it for handwriting analysis to verify its authenticity, but it is not definitively known at this time if it was written by Epstein.

An internal DOJ email from 2020, meanwhile, states that Trump flew with Epstein on his private plane at least eight times between 1993 and 1996, which was more than had been previously known.

On two occasions, Trump and Epstein shared flights with two people whom the DOJ described as “possible witnesses” in a criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime Epstein accomplice who is serving a prison sentence for conspiring to help him sexually abuse minors.

The DOJ’s post defending Trump from allegations made in the documents it had just released drew scrutiny from Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, who pointed out some basic logical inconsistencies with the department’s claims.

“Bizarre defensive post from DOJ saying if allegations of Trump had any credibility they would’ve been ‘weaponized’ against him,” he wrote in response. “But... if they had credibility, then pursuing them, by definition, wouldn’t be weaponization.”

Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh, who left the party over his disgust with Trump, said the DOJ post was further evidence of a justice system that had been totally compromised by the president’s personal interests.

“Technically, this tweet is coming from our government,” he wrote. “But it sounds like and reads like it’s coming from Trump’s lawyers. Trump has so completely corrupted our Justice Department.”

Walsh’s sentiment was echoed by Rep. Nellie Pou (D-NJ), who argued that “the US Department of Justice shouldn’t be acting like the White House’s personal law firm.”

Trump’s past relationship with Epstein has come under greater scrutiny in recent months, and the New York Times last week published a lengthy report detailing the two men’s years of friendship.

Stacey Williams, a former model who has accused Trump of groping her in front of Epstein in 1993, told the Times that the two men were engaged in “trophy hunting” when it came to their pursuits of women.

The Times report also found that Epstein and Maxwell over the years “introduced at least six women who have accused them of grooming or abuse to Mr. Trump,” including one who was a minor at the time.

The report emphasized, however, that “none have accused Mr. Trump himself of inappropriate behavior.”

Yale historian Greg Grandin believes that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is putting the US on a dangerous course that could lead to a new world war.

Writing in The New York Times on Monday, Grandin argued that the Trump administration seems determined to throw out the US-led international order that has been in place since World War II.

In its place, Grandin said, is “a vision of the world carved up into garrisoned spheres of competing influence,” in which the US has undisputed control over the Western Hemisphere.

As evidence, he pointed to the Trump White House’s recently published National Security Strategy that called for reviving the so-called Monroe Doctrine that in the past was used to justify US imperial aggression throughout Latin America, and that the Trump administration is using to justify its own military adventures in the region.

Among other things, Grandin said that the Trump administration has been carrying out military strikes against purported drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, and has also been “meddling in the internal politics of Brazil, Argentina, and Honduras, issuing scattershot threats against Colombia and Mexico, menacing Cuba and Nicaragua, increasing its influence over the Panama Canal, and seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.”

Most ominously, Grandin said, is how the US Department of Defense has been “carrying out a military buildup in the Caribbean that is all but unprecedented in its scale and concentration of firepower, seemingly aimed at effecting regime change in Venezuela.”

A large problem with dividing the globe into spheres controlled by major powers, Grandin continued, is that these powers inevitably come into violent conflict with one another.

Citing past statements and actions by the British Empire, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, Grandin argued that “as the world marched into a second global war, many of its belligerents did so citing the Monroe Doctrine.”

This dynamic is particularly dangerous in the case of Trump, who, according to Grandin, sees Latin America “as a theater of global rivalry, a place to extract resources, secure commodity chains, establish bulwarks of national security, fight the drug war, limit Chinese influence, and end migration.”

The result of this policy shift, Grandin concluded, “will most likely be more confrontation, more brinkmanship, more war.”

A democracy advocacy organization is stepping up pressure on the federal government to release more information on President Donald Trump’s scheme to receive a $230 million payout from the US Department of Justice.

Democracy Forward on Monday filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint against the DOJ and the US Department of Treasury, alleging that both agencies have so far refused to turn over any records related to what the group describes as Trump’s “stunning effort to obtain a $230 million taxpayer-funded payout for investigations into his own misconduct.”

The group notes that it has already filed multiple FOIA requests over the last several weeks, and in response neither DOJ or Treasury has “produced a single substantial record or issued a legally required determination.”

The complaint asks courts to compel DOJ and Treasury “to conduct searches for any and all responsive records” related to Democracy Forward’s past FOIA requests, and also to force the government “to produce, by a date certain, any and all non-exempt responsive records,” and to create an index “of any responsive records withheld under a claim of exemption.”

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said her organization’s lawsuit was a simple demand for government transparency.

“People in America deserve to know whether the Department of Justice is entertaining the president’s request to cut himself a taxpayer-funded $230 million check,” Perryman said. “If senior officials are processing this grift behind closed doors—including officials who used to represent him—that is not just bad optics, it is a direct threat to government integrity.”

Democracy Forward’s complaint stems from an October New York Times report that Trump was lobbying DOJ to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to him as compensation for the purported hardships he endured throughout the multiple criminal investigations and indictments leveled against him.

Trump was indicted in 2023 on federal charges related to his mishandling of top-secret government documents that he’d stashed in his Mar-a-Lago resort, as well as his efforts to illegally remain in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Both cases were dropped after Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

When asked about the DOJ payout scheme in the wake of the Times report, Trump insisted he would give any money paid out by the department to charity and asserted that he had been “damaged very greatly” by past criminal probes.

Perryman, however, insisted that Trump was not entitled to enrich himself off taxpayer funds.

“President Trump may think he can invoice people for the consequences of his own actions,” she said, “but this country still has laws, and we demand they be enforced.”

A new poll shows US voters’ approval of President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy has hit an all-time low, even as the president and his officials insist the economy is the best in the world.

The latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released Thursday found that only 31% of voters approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, the lowest figure in that survey throughout either of his two terms in office. Overall, 68% of voters said that the current state of the economy was “poor.”

What’s more, Trump’s approval rating on the economy among Republican voters now stands at just 69%, a strikingly low figure for a president who has consistently commanded loyalty from the GOP base.

Despite the grim numbers, the president and his administration have continued to say that the US is now in the middle of an economic boom.

During a Thursday morning interview on CNBC, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the US now has “the greatest $30 trillion economy in the world.”

“We are doing great,” Lutnick said. “Nothing bad is happening. Greatness is happening. We grew at 4% GDP! Come on!”

Lutnick’s message echoes the one Trump delivered earlier this week during a rally in Pennsylvania, where he said that voters’ concerns about being able to afford basics such as groceries, electricity, and healthcare were a “hoax” concocted by Democrats.

“Prices are coming down very substantially,” Trump falsely claimed during his speech. “But they have a new word. You know, they always have a hoax. The new word is affordability.”

As NPR reported on Thursday, data shows that the prices of groceries and electricity have continued to rise throughout Trump’s second term, directly contradicting his claims that prices are “coming down.”

University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson told NPR that Trump is playing with fire by making false claims about prices when US consumers can see costs persistently going up.

“Trump’s claims about inflation are false, and you can go to the grocery store and see it yourself,” Stevenson said.

Even some members of Trump’s own party are growing wary of him insisting that America is experiencing an unprecedented economic boom when voters feel otherwise.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told The Hill that Trump’s insistence on making happy talk about the economy would not fly with voters.

“You can’t call it a hoax and suggest that people are going to believe it,” she said. “What you say matters.”

An anonymous Republican senator also told The Hill that they were concerned about the optics of Trump building a massive luxury ballroom in the White House at a time when Americans say they are struggling financially.

“The cost of living just makes life very difficult on people,” the senator stressed.

And Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) gently pushed back on Trump’s messaging by telling CNN that “a lot of people are still having trouble making ends meet” in her state.

A top FBI official struggled on Thursday to answer basic questions about antifa, a loosely organized collective of anti-fascist activists that he labeled the top terrorist threat facing the US.

Michael Glasheen, operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, testified before the US House Committee on Homeland Security that antifa was “the most immediate violent threat” facing Americans today when it comes to domestic terrorism.

But when Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, asked Glasheen for specifics about this purportedly dire threat, he mostly came up empty.

“So where is antifa headquarters?” Thompson asked him.

Glasheen paused for several seconds and then said, “What we’re doing right now with the organization...” before Thompson interrupted him.

“Where in the United States does antifa exist?” asked Thompson.

“We are building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen replied.

“So what does that mean?” asked a bewildered Thompson. “I’m just, we’re trying to get information. You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? Whether they exist, how many members do they have in the United States as of right now?”

“Well, that’s very fluid,” Glasheen said. “It’s ongoing for us to understand that... no different from al-Qaeda and ISIS.”

Thompson again interrupted and tried to make Glasheen answer his original question.

“If you said antifa is the No. 1 domestic terrorist organization operating in the United States,” he said, “I just need to know where they are, how many people. I don’t want a name, I don’t want anything like that. Just, how many people have you identified, with the FBI, that antifa is made of?”

“Well, the investigations are active...” Glasheen said.

Thompson then became incredulous.

“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee and say something you can’t prove,” he said. “I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did.”

Many observers were stunned that Glasheen appeared to know so little about what he proclaimed to be the top domestic terrorist threat facing the US.

“Total amateur hour in US law enforcement,” remarked Democracy Docket news editor Matthew Kupfer, “where the No. 1 terror threat is an organization that does not formally exist and a career FBI official is dancing around before a congressional committee trying to make the Trump strategy sound legit.”

Zeteo editor-in-chief Mehdi Hasan argued that Glasheen’s testimony was proof that the administration was simply concocting domestic terrorism threats with zero basis in reality.

“Wow,” Hasan marveled. “Just a complete admission here that the entire ‘antifa’ threat narrative is totally manufactured by this administration.”

Fred Wellman, a Democratic congressional candidate in Missouri, wondered how many actual dangerous criminals are running free while the FBI focuses on taking down an organization that it apparently knows nothing about.

“This would be comical if there wasn’t real world impact from this idiocy,” Wellman wrote. “We have real crimes and real threats and they are chasing a fake ‘organization’ for politics.”

Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee also piled on Glasheen, citing his testimony as evidence that the Trump administration is completely unserious about law enforcement.

“If your ‘top threat’ has no headquarters, no organization, and no definition then it’s not a top threat,” they posted on social media. “The Trump administration is ignoring real threats, and the American people see right through it.”

Venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data platform company Palantir, is calling for the return of public hangings as part of a broader push to restore what he describes as “masculine leadership” to the US.

In a statement posted on X Friday, Lonsdale said that he supported changing the so-called “three strikes” anti-crime law to ensure that anyone who is convicted of three violent crimes gets publicly executed, rather than simply sent to prison for life.

“If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law,” he wrote. “We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others.”

Lonsdale then added that “our society needs balance,” and said that “it’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Lonsdale’s views on public hangings being necessary to restore “masculine leadership” drew swift criticism.

Gil Durán, a journalist who documents the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley in his newsletter “The Nerd Reich,” argued in a Saturday post that Lonsdale’s call for public hangings showed that US tech elites are “entering a more dangerous and desperate phase of radicalization.”

“For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump’s authoritarian rule,” Durán explained. “Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale.”

Taulby Edmondson, an adjunct professor of history, religion, and culture at Virginia Tech, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the rhetoric Lonsdale uses to justify the return of public hangings has even darker intonations than calls for state-backed violence.

“A point of nuance here: ‘masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable’ is how lynch mobs are described, not state-sanctioned executions,” he observed.

Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll argued that Lonsdale’s remarks were symbolic of a kind of performative masculinity that has infected US culture.

“Immaturity masquerading as strength is the defining personal characteristic of our age,” he wrote.

Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash warned Lonsdale that his call for public hangings could have unintended consequences for members of the Silicon Valley elite.

“Well, Joe, Mark Zuckerberg has sole control over Facebook, which directly enabled the Rohingya genocide,” he wrote. “So let’s have the conversation.”

And Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin noted that Lonsdale has been a major backer of the University of Austin, an unaccredited liberal arts college that has been pitched as an alternative to left-wing university education with the goal of preparing “thoughtful and ethical innovators, builders, leaders, public servants and citizens through open inquiry and civil discourse.”

A leaked memo written by US Attorney General Pam Bondi directs the Department of Justice to compile a list of potential “domestic terrorism” organizations that espouse “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment.”

The memo, which was obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein, expands upon National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by President Donald Trump in late September that demanded 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.”

The new Bondi memo instructs law enforcement agencies to refer “suspected” domestic terrorism cases to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), which will then undertake an “exhaustive investigation contemplated by NSPM-7” that will incorporate “a focused strategy to root out all culpable participants—including organizers and funders—in all domestic terrorism activities.”

The memo identifies the “domestic terrorism threat” as organizations that use “violence or the threat of violence” to advance political goals such as “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.”

Commenting on the significance of the memo, Klippenstein criticized mainstream media organizations for largely ignoring the implications of NSPM-7, which was drafted and signed in the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“For months, major media outlets have largely blown off the story of NSPM-7, thinking it was all just Trump bluster and too crazy to be serious,” he wrote. “But a memo like this one shows you that the administration is absolutely taking this seriously—even if the media are not—and is actively working to operationalize NSPM-7.”

Klippenstein also warned that NSPM-7 appeared to be the start of a new “war on terrorism,” but “only this time, millions of Americans like you and I could be the target.”

Economists on Wednesday expressed significant concerns after new data from global payroll processing firm ADP estimated that the US economy lost 32,000 jobs last month.

As reported by CNBC, small businesses bore the brunt of the job losses, as firms with fewer than 50 employees shed a total of 120,000 jobs, more than offsetting the 90,000 in job gains reported by firms with 50 or more employees.

The loss of 32,000 jobs in November marked a major miss for economists’ consensus estimate of 40,000 jobs added on the month, and CNBC noted that the total number of jobs lost according to ADP data “was the biggest drop since March 2023.”

Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, noted in a post on X that the job losses recorded by ADP were widespread across the US economy.

“Yikes,” she wrote in reaction to the report. “Most industries were doing layoffs. The only ones still are hiring are hospitality and healthcare.”

Long also said the disparity between small and large businesses in terms of job growth was more evidence that the US is experiencing a “K-shaped” economy in which those at the top of the economic ladder thrive, even as everyone else struggles.

“Larger companies are still hiring,” she explained. “Smaller firms (under 50 workers) are doing the layoffs. It’s been a very tough year for small biz due to tariffs and more selective spending from lower and middle-class consumers.”

Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy at the Schwab Center for Financial Research, observed that ADP hasn’t reported such a big drop in small-business employment since October 2020, when the US economy was suffering through the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, cautioned against reading too much into ADP data, although he added that “in the absence of up to date government payrolls, all other signs point to a further deteriorating labor market.”

Charlie Bilello, chief market strategist at financial planner Creative Planning, argued that the ADP jobs numbers were part of a negative three-month trend in which the US economy lost an estimated 4,000 jobs per month, which he said was “the first three-month decline since the 2020 recession.”

Bilello added that “a year ago, we were adding over 200,000 jobs per month.”

Diane Swonk, chief economist at accounting firm KPMG, argued that the ADP report showed job losses in the US economy were “broad based” and “were accompanied by a cooling of wage gains” for workers who still have jobs or are switching from one job to another.

“Those with a job are clinging on, while those without are left wanting,” she explained.

Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, argued that the ADP report blows up President Donald Trump’s spin about the health of the US economy.

“The booming job market exists only in Donald Trump’s demented head,” he wrote.

Democratic lawmakers who participated in a video warning US military personnel against following unlawful orders issued by President Donald Trump remained defiant after being contacted by the FBI.

As reported by Reuters on Tuesday, the FBI has requested interviews with Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), as well as Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Md.), and Jason Crow (D-Colo.), just days after Trump demanded their imprisonment or even death for supposed “sedition.”

One US Department of Justice official told Reuters that the FBI interviews are to determine if the Democratic lawmakers engaged in “any wrongdoing” when they spoke out against the president potentially giving unlawful orders that pit the US military against American civilians.

The Democrats, however, vowed that they would not be intimidated by any FBI investigation.

In a social media post, Slotkin said that Trump’s push to jail the Democrats for exercising their First Amendment rights demonstrated the reason why they decided to participate in the video in the first place. Slotkin accused Trump of “weaponizing the federal government against his perceived enemies,” while adding that he “does not believe laws apply to him or his Cabinet.”

“This is not the America I know,” added Slotkin, a former CIA analyst. “I’m not going to let this next step from the FBI stop me from speaking up for my country and our Constitution.”

Houlahan, Crow, Goodlander, and Deluzio issued a joint statement accusing Trump of “using the FBI as a tool to intimidate and harass members of Congress,” and vowed that “no amount of intimidation or harassment will ever stop us from doing our jobs and honoring our Constitution.”

“We swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” they emphasized. “That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. We will not be bullied. We will never give up the ship.”

The FBI interview requests came just a day after the US Department of Defense (DOD) said it had “received serious allegations of misconduct” against Kelly, who is a retired US Navy captain, and was launching an investigation that could result in him being recalled to active duty to face court-martial hearings for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

In a separate social media post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attacked all the Democrats who participated in the video as the “seditious six” and said that Kelly had been singled out for DOD investigation because he was the only member who was still subject to UCMJ given his status as a retired naval officer.

The US Department of Defense on Monday announced it was launching an investigation into a Democratic senator who had participating in a video warning active-duty troops to not follow illegal orders given by President Donald Trump.

In a social media post, the DoD said it had “received serious allegations of misconduct” against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a retired US Navy captain who was one of several Democrats with backgrounds in national defense to speak out against the president potentially giving unlawful orders that pit the US military against American civilians.

As a result of the investigation, the DoD said that Kelly could be recalled to active duty to face potential court-martial proceedings for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

“All servicemembers are reminded that they have a legal obligation under the UCMJ to obey lawful orders and that orders are presumed to be lawful,” the DoD said. “A servicemember’s personal philosophy does not justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.”

In addition to Kelly, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Chrissy Houlahan (D-Md.), and Jason Crow (D-Colo.) appeared in the video.

In a follow-up social media post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attacked the Democrats in the video as the “seditious six” and said that Kelly had been singled out for investigation because he was the only member who was still subject to UCMJ given his status as a retired Naval officer.

“As was announced, the Department is reviewing his statements and actions, which were addressed directly to all troops while explicitly using his rank and service affiliation—lending the appearance of authority to his words,” wrote Hegseth. “Kelly’s conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.”

Trump has been calling for the prosecution of the six Democrats who appeared in the video for the last several days, and he even went so far as to say in one Truth Social post they deserve to be executed for “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

Shortly after the Pentagon announced its investigation into Kelly, he responded with a lengthy social media post in which he defended his service record and vowed not to back down despite threats from the Trump administration.

“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work,” he said. “I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) responded on X with a much shorter five-word post that read, “F--- you and your investigation.”

Legal experts and reporters reacted with shock on Wednesday after Trump-appointed interim US Attorney Lindsey Halligan acknowledged that a grand jury never voted on the operative indictment filed against former FBI Director James Comey.

Politico reports that the admission appears to have put the Comey prosecution “in serious jeopardy,” as Halligan told US District Judge Michael Nachmanoff the grand jury never saw the final indictment that was handed down in September that charged Comey with one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding.

The final indictment was a revised version of an originally proposed three-count indictment that needed to be changed after the grand jury rejected one of the proposed charges against Comey.

Former federal prosecutor Ken White attempted to piece together exactly what Halligan did in a post on Bluesky.

“So here’s what apparently happened: they tried to indict Comey on the last day of the statute with a three-count indictment,” he explained. “The grand jury rejected one. Rather than cross it out or indicate on the indictment that only two of the three counts were voted upon, Halligan creates a new indictment, which shows only the two counts they true billed, and has the foreperson sign it without presenting it to the grand jury.”

Assistant US Attorney Tyler Lemons told Nachmanoff that it was necessary to revise the indictment on short notice after grand jurors no-billed one of the charges since the statute of limitations for Comey’s alleged crimes was set to expire within mere hours.

“They really had no other way to return it,” he told the court.

Nonetheless, many observers expressed shock that Halligan could make such an elementary error that could singlehandedly get the entire case against Comey dismissed.

“Lindsey Halligan should be immediately disbarred,” wrote Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at the Georgia State College School of Law, in a post on X.

Political and leadership consultant Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin, a former human rights attorney, also believed that Hallingan should face severe consequences for pushing forward with an indictment that had not been voted on by a full grand jury.

“This should result in the interim US Attorney losing her bar license,” she wrote on Bluesky. “Never, in almost 30 years as an attorney, have I heard of this big of an intentional fuck up before a grand jury.”

Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) argued that Halligan’s actions were enough to justify her termination as interim US attorney.

“In a normal Department of Justice not run by hacks and sycophants and malicious clowns,” he wrote, “Lindsey Halligan would resign and the indictment against James Comey would be dismissed.”

Quinta Jurecic, a longtime legal journalist who writes for The Atlantic, said that she found Halligan’s error to be “impressive” because “I honestly didn’t even know this was a mistake you could make.”

Anti-Trump attorney George Conway, meanwhile, encouraged his followers on X to “please remember to give thanks to the Lord that Trump and his people are so unbelievably incompetent.”

Maya Sen, a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School, drew a line between the quality of legal competence in the Comey case and a three-judge panel in Texas shooting down the administration’s efforts to redraw Texas’ congressional map as part of a mid-decade gerrymandering scheme.

“High levels of incompetence between this and the DOJ-TX gerrymandering situation,” she wrote on X. “It’s hard to find people with high levels of competence and expertise when maximizing on ideological and personal loyalty, and this is a problem for [Republicans] in the age of educational polarization.”

Dozens of former US Department of Justice attorneys have now gone on record to describe the unprecedented corruption of federal law enforcement taking place during President Donald Trump’s second term.

In a lengthy story published on Sunday by the New York Times, the former DOJ attorneys described rampant politicization of prosecutions, directives to dig up evidence on Trump’s political foes, and orders to drop investigations into potential terrorist plots and white-collar crimes.

Several attorneys told the paper that the corruption of the DOJ began on Trump’s very first day in office when he issued a blanket pardon to everyone who had been convicted of rioting at the US Capitol building on his behalf on January 6, 2021, in a last-ditch effort to prevent the certification of former President Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

Gregory Rosen, who oversaw the unit at the DOJ that prosecuted January 6 rioters, told the Times that he felt “numb” seeing the pardons of the rioters, but he nonetheless facilitated the pardons because he understood they were within the president’s constitutional powers.

Mike Romano, a prosecutor who worked on January 6 cases, said that he had to resign as soon as he saw the broad scope of the pardons, which included rioters who were guilty of assaulting police officers.

“It’s incredibly demoralizing to see something you worked on for four years wiped away by a lie—I mean the idea that prosecution of the rioters was a grave national injustice,” he said. “We had strong evidence against every person we prosecuted.”

The mass pardon of the Capitol rioters was only the beginning, as prosecutors said that this politicization soon swept over the entire department.

In early March, for instance, Trump signed an executive order targeting law firms that had in the past represented prominent Democrats. Among other things, the order demanded federal agencies cancel government contracts with the firms and strip the firms’ employees of their security clearances.

The orders also accused some of the firms in engaging in supposed racial discrimination for maintaining policies related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Dena Robinson, a former attorney at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told the Times that the DEI investigation into law firm Perkins Coie was a particularly extreme example of the department’s politicization under Trump.

“The idea of the investigation was that Perkins Coie supposedly engaged in illegal discrimination against white men,” she explained. “But Perkins Coie is an extremely white firm—only 3% of the partners are Black. When my colleague pointed that out, the leadership didn’t care. They’d already reached their conclusion.”

Robinson said that this attitude was emblematic of how Trump appointees conducted investigations: They begin with desired conclusions and systematically ignore evidence that undermines them.

“I wouldn’t even call it the Justice Department anymore,” she said. “It’s become Trump’s personal law firm. I think Americans should be enraged.”

Another aspect of the DOJ under Trump that has drawn scrutiny has been his use of pardons for political allies, including his decision last month to pardon Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges in 2023, and who had helped boost the value of the Trump family’s own cryptocurrency venture.

A new investigation from ProPublica found that Trump’s use of the pardon hasn’t just been relegated to prosecutions that took place during Democratic administrations.

The ProPublica report found Trump had wiped out convictions in “at least a dozen criminal cases that originated during his first term,” many of which involved politicians convicted of taking bribes or engaging in kickback schemes.

Frank O. Bowman III, a professor emeritus of law at the University of Missouri, told Pro Publica that the Trump pardons taken together are part of what he described as “the systematic destruction of the Justice Department as an objective agency that seeks to uphold the law and fight crime.”

In addition to this, Joseph Tirrell, former director of the Departmental Ethics Office, told the Times that the Trump DOJ has been hacking away at rules that bar law-enforcement officials from accepting gifts.

In one instance, Tirrell said he tried to intervene to stop DOJ employees from accepting cigars given by mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor and a soccer ball from the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).

“I felt like I really had to go to the mattress to convince the AG’s office: You can pay for the item or you can return the item or you can throw the item away,” he said. “There’s no other way to do this.”

Shortly after this, Tirrell said he got a call from the FBI general counsel inquiring “about changing exceptions to the gift rules because his boss, [FBI Director] Kash Patel, felt like he should be able to accept more expensive gifts.”

Tirrell said that he then reminded the counsel that “his client was not Mr. Patel, but the United States.”

Patel in recent weeks has come under scrutiny for some of the perks he’s taken during his time as FBI director, including using the FBI’s private jet to fly to a wrestling event where his girlfriend, country music singer Alexis Wilkins, was performing the national anthem.

MS NOW reported on Monday that Patel has also given Wilkins “a security detail made up of elite FBI agents usually assigned to a SWAT team in the FBI field office in Nashville,” an unprecedented arrangement for the girlfriend of the FBI director.

Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI agent and MS NOW law enforcement contributor, said that there is “no legitimate justification” for granting Wilkins this level of security.

“This is a clear abuse of position and misuse of government resources,” he said. “She is not his spouse, does not live in the same house or even the same city.”

As poll numbers on his handling of the US economy have continued to sink in recent weeks, President Donald Trump has floated sending Americans a $2,000 check that he has claimed will be funded with revenue collected from his tariffs on imported products.

However, economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) on Tuesday crunched some numbers and found that Trump’s proposed tariff “dividend” simply doesn’t add up.

In particular, Baker found that the revenue being generated by the tariffs is less than half of the total cost of sending nearly every US citizen a $2,000 check.

“At $2,000 a piece it would come to $600 billion, more than twice what Trump is collecting from us with his import taxes,” Baker explained. “Since he’s already $330 billion short, how can Trump think he has money to pay down the national debt?”

Baker declared Trump’s tariff math “crazy,” and then speculated that the president sincerely believes the false claims he’s been making about securing $18 trillion in investments from foreign countries. What’s more, Baker said that it appears that no one on the president’s economic policy team wants to tell him that this belief is purely delusional.

“People like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or National Economic Adviser Kevin Hassett may not be brilliant intellects, but they know that Trump does not have trillions of dollars from foreign countries to play with, and that we are still running deficits that would ordinarily be considered very large,” he said. “But they are too scared of Donald Trump to explain this to him.”

Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, said in an interview with CNN published on Tuesday that Trump could also reignite inflation by sending out $2,000 checks to everyone, as this would likely increase demand for goods and services without a corresponding increase in supply.

“All of this is exactly the wrong recipe if you want to get inflation under control and make things feel more affordable,” she said.

York also said in a separate interview with the Associated Press that it makes little sense to cut Americans a check when one of the main reasons they’re paying more for so many products has been the president’s tariffs.

“If the goal is relief for Americans, just get rid of the tariffs,” she said.

Michael Pearce, deputy chief US economist at Oxford Economics, echoed York’s concern about the dividend checks worsening inflation, and he told CNN that the risk with Trump’s plan is “if you add a stimulus check on top of a tax cut refund, you’re going to overheat the economy.”

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers was even more blunt in his take on Trump’s tariff dividend idea, which he labeled, “insane, unfair, pointless and dumb.”

“If tariffs are making Americans poorer,” Wolfers told CNN, “the simplest and fairest way to stop that is not to tariff.”

President Donald Trump's policy of bombing purported drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, which multiple legal experts have decried as an illegal act extrajudicial murder, is now meeting resistance from a top US ally.

CNN reported on Tuesday that the UK has now stopped sharing intelligence related to suspected drug-trafficking vessels with the US because the country does not want to be complicit in strikes that it believes violate international law.

CNN's sources say that the UK stopped giving the US information about boats in the region roughly a month ago, shortly after Trump began authorizing drone strikes against them in a campaign that so far has killed at least 76 people.

"Before the US military began blowing up boats in September, countering illicit drug trafficking was handled by law enforcement and the US Coast Guard, [and] cartel members and drug smugglers were treated as criminals with due process rights," explained CNN.

Last month, after his administration had already launched several strikes, Trump declared drug cartels enemy combatants and claimed he has the right to launch military strikes against suspected drug-trafficking boats.

Appearing on CNN on Tuesday to discuss the story, reporter Natasha Bertrand described the decision to stop sharing intelligence as "a really significant rupture" between the US and its closest ally.

"We're told that the UK is deeply uncomfortable with [the boat strikes], and they believe that it is pretty blatantly illegal," Bertrand explained. "It really underscores the continued questions surrounding the legality of this US military campaign."

The US military began its boat attacks in the Caribbean in September, and has since expanded them to purported drug boats operating in the Pacific Ocean.

Reporting last month from the Wall Street Journal indicated that the administration was also preparing to attack a variety of targets inside Venezuela, whose government Trump has baselessly accused of running drug cartels. Potential targets include “ports and airports controlled by the military that are allegedly used to traffic drugs, including naval facilities and airstrips.”

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier has now arrived off the coast of Latin America, in a move that the paper notes "has fueled speculation the Trump administration intends to dramatically escalate its deadly counternarcotics campaign there, possibly through direct attacks on Venezuela."

Reports from the US government and the United Nations have not identified Venezuela as a significant source of drugs that enter the United States, and the country plays virtually no role in the trafficking of fentanyl, the primary cause of drug overdoses in the US.

The administration's military aggression in Latin America has also sparked a fierce backlash in the region, where dozens of political leaders last month condemned the boat attacks, while also warning that they could just be the start of a regime change war reminiscent of Cold War-era US-backed coups like ones that occurred in Chile, Brazil, and other nations.