The U.S. Department of Labor has deployed a specialized "strike team" to California to investigate what federal officials describe as systemic fraud and financial mismanagement within the state's unemployment insurance program. The action targets a system that borrowed $21 billion in federal funds just to keep running and now faces mounting evidence of improper payments, eligibility failures, and outright theft of taxpayer money.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer announced the move alongside DOL Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito, a former NYPD officer and ex-congressman from Long Island. The strike team will include specialists from the Labor Department's national and regional offices.
Chavez-DeRemer did not mince words about what prompted the intervention:
"Financial issues and potential fraud in California's unemployment insurance program will be fully examined. The previous administration turned a blind eye toward failing Labor programs. This ends now."
California received roughly $290 billion in COVID relief. That staggering sum was supposed to sustain the state through the pandemic, including its unemployment insurance system. Instead, California's UI trust fund was depleted, forcing the state to borrow $21 billion in federal funds to keep checks going out the door, as Fox News reports.
The Labor Department cited an 83-page California State Auditor report in building its case. Chavez-DeRemer also wrote a letter to California's Employment Development Department citing a litany of failures:
That list reads less like a policy critique and more like a systems autopsy. Every checkpoint designed to prevent fraud either failed or was ignored. And while the trust fund bled dry, California workers faced the downstream consequence: higher UI taxes to cover the gap.
The people who played by the rules got punished for the failures of the people who didn't.
Inspector General D'Esposito painted a grim national picture that implicates California as a central player. His office found nearly $1 billion in taxpayer funds "at risk" nationwide due to COVID-related UI fraud. An analysis of 6.5 million prepaid debit cards used for pandemic unemployment benefits revealed $720 million still sitting on those cards, unrecovered.
"My office has warned that, absent swift action, U.S. taxpayers risk losing nearly a billion dollars in fraudulently obtained benefits."
Think about that number in concrete terms. Seven hundred and twenty million dollars loaded onto debit cards, floating somewhere in the system, belonging to no legitimate claimant. That money didn't vanish into the ether. Someone has those cards. Someone spent or is spending that money. And until now, no one with the authority to act seemed particularly bothered by it.
D'Esposito framed the stakes plainly:
"This is taxpayer money, and it demands immediate attention."
This is not an abstract accounting problem. At least one California UI steward, someone entrusted with managing the system, was convicted of using her position to file nearly $860,000 in fraudulent claims. Civilians were also convicted of exploiting the program, though specific case details remain limited in the public record.
A government employee, hired to administer benefits for people who lost their jobs, instead used her access to steal nearly a million dollars. That is the kind of fraud that erodes public trust not just in a single program but in the entire apparatus of government aid. Every legitimate claimant who waited weeks for a delayed payment while insiders looted the system has a right to be furious.
And it raises the uncomfortable question that Sacramento apparently never wanted to ask: if the people running the program were stealing from it, how many claims that looked legitimate on paper were anything but?
California governs by announcement. New programs, expanded eligibility, record spending, all delivered with the confidence of a state that believes scale equals competence. But the backend, the actual administration, the fraud controls, the auditing, the accountability, consistently collapses under the weight of its own ambitions.
The EDD has been a known disaster for years. Legitimate claimants during the pandemic reported months-long waits, frozen accounts, and unanswered calls by the hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, fraudulent claims sailed through. The system was simultaneously inaccessible to the people who needed it and wide open to the people exploiting it.
Fox News Digital reached out to Governor Gavin Newsom for comment. No response was noted.
The silence is its own statement. When $21 billion in borrowed federal money and a conviction of your own staff for fraud don't warrant a public response, you are either confident the press won't press you or indifferent to the outcome. In California, it may be both.
Chavez-DeRemer's deployment of specialists is a direct assertion of federal oversight over a state that treated pandemic relief money like a blank check with no memo line. The strike team approach signals that this administration views California's UI failures not as a bureaucratic hiccup but as a front in a broader fight against government waste and fraud.
"Immediately, we are engaging a specialized strike team to uncover any potential fraud or abuse and quickly moving to protect the American worker and taxpayers. I look forward to restoring the California UI program's integrity and financial health."
D'Esposito connected the fraud directly to the cost of living, a link that politicians who benefit from bloated spending never want voters to make:
"When we root out fraud, we protect taxpayers and lower the real cost of living."
He's right. Every dollar stolen from UI programs is a dollar that either adds to the national debt or gets clawed back through higher taxes and reduced services. Fraud is not a victimless line item. It lands on the paychecks of working Americans who never filed a false claim in their lives.
For years, the prevailing attitude toward pandemic-era spending was that speed justified sloppiness. Money had to go out the door fast, the argument went, and some waste was the price of urgency. That framing conveniently absolved every bureaucrat and politician who failed to build even minimal guardrails against theft.
The urgency argument had a shelf life, and it expired a long time ago. California has had years to audit its own system, recover stolen funds, and hold bad actors accountable. An 83-page state auditor report apparently wasn't enough to trigger serious internal reform. It took the federal government showing up with a strike team.
California borrowed $21 billion to fund a system it couldn't manage, oversaw fraud it couldn't detect, and employed at least one steward who stole from the people she was supposed to serve. Somewhere in that wreckage are the workers who actually lost their jobs during the pandemic and deserved a system that worked for them.
The strike team is there for them, too.
A Department of Homeland Security agent fired multiple rounds at 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez on South Padre Island, Texas, on March 15, 2025, after Martinez allegedly drove his car into another DHS agent. Martinez was transported to a hospital in nearby Brownsville, where he was later pronounced dead.
The incident, now under investigation by the Texas Department of Public Safety Ranger Division, has drawn competing narratives. A DHS spokesperson said Martinez "intentionally ran over" an agent with DHS's Homeland Security Investigations and that a second agent "fired defensive shots." Attorneys for Martinez's family tell a different story.
Charles Stam and Alex Stamm, representing the family, said:
"Martinez was trying to comply with instructions from local law enforcement when he was shot."
The family's lawyers have called for a "full and fair investigation" and say the family has been seeking answers for nearly a year.
The case resurfaced after records obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group, were released. The details they contain are limited: a DHS agent fired, a U.S. citizen died, and an investigation is ongoing. That's thin ground for the sweeping conclusions being built on top of it, as New York Post reports.
Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, used the records to paint a broad indictment of immigration enforcement:
"These records paint a deeply troubling picture of the violent methods used by ICE."
She went further, claiming ICE's own data shows "a dramatic spike of nearly 400 percent in use-of-force incidents" in the early months of the current administration, citing hospitalizations, bystanders caught up in operations, and Martinez's death.
That 400 percent figure demands context that the records apparently don't provide. A spike from what baseline? Over what period? Measured how? When an advocacy organization drops a number like that without showing its math, the purpose is political, not informational.
The framing around this case follows a well-worn pattern. A tragic incident involving law enforcement is immediately conscripted into a broader narrative about systemic abuse. Martinez's death becomes not a single disputed encounter on a Texas island, but supposed proof that the entire immigration enforcement apparatus is out of control.
Notice the construction. Federal agents conducting immigration enforcement reportedly shot at least five people in January alone, including individuals named Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Each of these cases presumably has its own facts, its own circumstances, its own investigation. Bundling them together serves a rhetorical purpose, not an analytical one.
The Trump administration has budgeted $170 billion for immigration agencies through September 2029. That's a serious investment in border security and interior enforcement. When you scale up operations of any kind, incidents increase in raw numbers. That's arithmetic, not evidence of misconduct. The relevant question is whether agents are following their training and operating within legal authority. That's what investigations determine.
None of this means Martinez's death shouldn't be investigated thoroughly. It should. A U.S. citizen is dead, and his family deserves clear answers about what happened on that road in South Padre Island.
But honest scrutiny cuts in every direction. If Martinez drove his vehicle into a federal agent, that agent faced an immediate lethal threat. A car is a deadly weapon. Law enforcement officers who are struck or about to be struck by a vehicle have a right, and often a duty, to respond with force. The family's attorneys say Martinez was trying to comply with instructions. The DHS spokesperson says he intentionally ran over an agent. Those accounts cannot both be true, and the Texas Rangers are the ones tasked with sorting it out.
The attorneys for Martinez's family said:
"Ruben's family has been pursuing transparency and accountability for nearly a year now and will continue to do so for as long as it takes."
That's their right, and no one should begrudge a grieving family for exercising it.
What's worth resisting is the attempt to transform every use-of-force incident into an argument against enforcement itself. The logic runs like this:
That reasoning would disqualify any serious effort to secure the border or enforce immigration law. Which, of course, is the point. Groups like American Oversight don't object to how enforcement is conducted. They object to enforcement.
The facts of the Martinez case will emerge through investigation. If agents acted unlawfully, accountability should follow. If Martinez posed a lethal threat to a federal officer, the response was justified. The evidence will tell us which.
What it won't tell us, no matter how many press releases accompany the records, is that enforcing the law is inherently violent. That conclusion was written before the first document was ever filed.
A Republican strategist went on MSNBC this weekend and did something the network's hosts probably didn't expect: he defended Jasmine Crockett.
Matthew Bartlett, appearing on MS NOW's "The Weekend" on Saturday, argued that Democratic staffers and the team behind "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" had "done Jasmine Crockett dirty" in a sequence of events surrounding a Texas Democratic Senate primary that has become a case study in friendly fire.
The controversy centers on state Rep. James Talarico, Crockett's opponent in the primary, who appeared on "The Late Show" on Tuesday. That appearance triggered a mess. Colbert accused CBS of blocking the interview from airing, citing what he described as the FCC's crackdown on the longstanding equal candidate time rule. CBS flatly denied it.
"THE LATE SHOW was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Rep. James Talarico."
So someone wasn't telling the truth. And in the wreckage of that contradiction, Bartlett argued, it was Crockett who got buried.
The story that circulated earlier in the week was simple: Trump was supposedly behind the suppression of Talarico's interview, wielding federal power to silence a Democratic candidate through broadcast regulators. It had all the ingredients the left loves. A villain. A victim. A chilling effect on free speech, as Fox News reports.
Bartlett wasn't buying it. He told Jonathan Capehart on Saturday:
"This notion [that] Trump [was] going to stop Colbert in order to stop Talarico — people kind of went with this narrative."
Then he landed his point:
"I'm not sure it's true. I think, candidly, they've actually done Jasmine Crockett dirty."
When Capehart pressed him on who "they" referred to, Bartlett pointed the finger at Colbert's media team and Democratic staffers connected to Talarico.
Here's the timeline that tells the real story. On Tuesday, Crockett told MS NOW's Jen Psaki that she "received a phone call" informing her CBS had been told "they could go ahead and move forward with the interview of James Talarico," provided that Crockett and the other candidate in the race, Ahmad Hassan, received equal time.
That sounds reasonable on paper. Equal time is a standard broadcast obligation when candidates are involved. But by Friday, Crockett said she had still not been invited to appear on Colbert's show.
So Talarico got his national television moment. Crockett got a phone call and a promise. And the promise evaporated.
Crockett herself seemed to grasp the dynamic, telling Psaki on Tuesday that the entire controversy probably gave her opponent "the boost he was looking for." Which is exactly what Bartlett argued. Talarico, he noted, got a nice little bump in fundraising from the whole episode. The victim narrative worked, just not for the person who was actually victimized.
What makes this worth watching isn't the specifics of a Texas primary. It's the pattern.
The left built a narrative around Trump suppressing the media to protect itself from accountability, then used that narrative to elevate one Democratic candidate at the expense of another. The supposed censorship story became the campaign ad. And when CBS publicly denied that the interview was ever blocked, nobody paused to recalibrate. The story had already done its work.
Bartlett summarized it cleanly:
"Everyone likes to be the victim. I'm not sure Talarico is the victim of Trump's suppression. I think Jasmine Crockett might be the victim of a false media narrative."
Talarico's campaign, for its part, declined to comment when asked about the situation. Silence is a choice.
There's a deeper irony here that conservatives should note. The FCC's equal time rule exists precisely to prevent broadcasters from tipping the scales in elections. It's supposed to be a safeguard. But in this case, the rule's invocation became the story itself, a vehicle for generating sympathetic coverage for one candidate while the other waited by the phone for an invitation that never came.
The rule didn't protect Crockett. It was used to frame a narrative around her opponent's appearance, generate outrage, drive donations, and then quietly ignored when it came time to actually provide her the platform she was owed.
Conservatives have long argued that the mainstream media and the Democratic establishment function as a single organism. This episode doesn't disprove that theory, but it does complicate it in an instructive way. The machine doesn't just target Republicans. When a Democratic primary gets competitive, the same apparatus can be turned on any candidate who isn't the preferred choice.
Crockett is no conservative. She's a reliable progressive vote in Congress. But reliability, it turns out, doesn't earn you loyalty within the party infrastructure. It earns you a phone call on Tuesday and silence by Friday.
A GOP strategist had to go on MSNBC to point it out. That tells you everything about who's actually paying attention.
Public infrastructure costs tied to Barack Obama's Presidential Center in Chicago have ballooned well beyond original projections, and not a single government office involved in the project has produced a unified accounting of how much taxpayers are actually paying. That's the central finding of a Fox News Digital investigation that submitted records requests and press inquiries to a constellation of Illinois and Chicago agencies, only to be met with silence, statutory stalling, and claims of having no responsive records.
The Illinois Department of Transportation now pegs its share at approximately $229 million. That's up from a roughly $174 million preliminary estimate dating back to 2017. The city of Chicago's side remains a black box.
When the project was approved in 2018, Obama pledged to privately fund construction of the expansive 19.3-acre campus in historic Jackson Park on Chicago's South Side. The facility was framed as a "gift" to Chicago. Eight years later, the gift comes with an infrastructure invoice that no one in government seems willing to total up.
IDOT provided Fox News Digital with an approximate breakdown of its $229 million in spending in July:
An IDOT spokesperson described the earlier $174 million figure as a "2017 was a preliminary cost estimate," which is bureaucrat-speak for "the real number was always going to be higher and we knew it." The state's contribution alone has jumped roughly $55 million beyond that initial projection, as Fox News reports.
On the city side, the picture is even murkier. When the project was approved, roughly $175 million in city infrastructure spending was discussed, meaning the combined early estimate sat around $350 million, split between state and city. Chicago's 2024–2028 Capital Improvement Plan lists more than $206 million for roadway and utility work surrounding the project. Whether that figure overlaps with the state's numbers, exceeds the original city estimate, or represents the full scope of Chicago's commitment remains unknown, because no one will say.
The construction costs for the center itself have followed an identical trajectory. Early estimates pegged the facility at around $330 million. According to the Obama Foundation's 2024 tax filings, that number has reached at least $850 million.
Fox News Digital submitted records requests and press inquiries to IDOT, the Chicago Department of Transportation, the Chicago Office of Budget and Management, the Mayor's Office, and Governor J.B. Pritzker's administration. The results read like a case study in coordinated non-response.
CDOT acknowledged a FOIA request dated October 7, 2025, took a statutory extension, and then never issued a final determination or produced the requested records. OBM's FOIA response was four words long: "does not have responsive records." No cost overruns, no reallocations, no breakdown of spending across major components. Nothing.
Mayor Brandon Johnson's office did not respond to repeated requests for the city's total infrastructure spending tied to the project or for how much more Chicago expects to commit. Pritzker's office gave conflicting responses and ultimately produced no records showing the state's total infrastructure spending. The Illinois Attorney General's Public Access Counselor is now reviewing whether multiple agencies complied with state transparency laws.
Consider what this means in practice. Hundreds of millions in public dollars are flowing to infrastructure surrounding a single development, and the taxpayers funding it cannot obtain a straight answer about the total cost from any level of government. Not one office provided a unified, up-to-date figure. Not one clarified whether city and state totals overlap. Not one demonstrated that anyone, anywhere, is tracking the full public tab.
The center sits on 19 acres of historic public parkland, transferred to the project under a controversial deal for just $10 and a 99-year agreement. Legal challenges to the transfer were ultimately dismissed, though the merits of the arguments were not adjudicated on. Cornell Drive, a four-lane roadway, was permanently removed under the center's site plan.
A $470 million reserve fund tied to the project has received only $1 million in deposits. That detail alone deserves attention. A fund presumably designed to ensure long-term maintenance and community benefit sits nearly empty while public infrastructure costs climb with no ceiling in sight.
Obama Foundation spokesperson Emily Bittner offered the kind of statement that sounds generous until you examine what it doesn't address:
"The Obama Foundation is investing $850 million in private funding to build the Obama Presidential Center and give back to the community that made the Obamas' story possible."
"After decades of underinvestment on the South Side of Chicago, the OPC is catalyzing investment, from both public and private sources, to build economic opportunity for residents through jobs, housing, and public spaces and amenities."
Note the framing. The Foundation counts the $850 million as its investment, as though the hundreds of millions in taxpayer-funded infrastructure are simply "catalyzed" investment rather than a direct public subsidy. The phrase "from both public and private sources" does a lot of quiet work in that sentence, folding an enormous and growing taxpayer obligation into the language of civic revitalization.
Illinois GOP Chair Kathy Salvi was considerably less diplomatic. She told Fox News Digital:
"Illinois Republicans saw this coming a mile away. Now, right on cue, Illinois Democrats are leaving taxpayers high and dry and putting them on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars to support the ugliest building in Chicago."
"Illinois' culture of corruption is humming along with pay-to-play deals to their allies and friends while lying to Illinois voters."
Salvi's tone is sharp, but her underlying point is the one that matters: taxpayers were told this would be a privately funded project. The public infrastructure costs were supposed to be defined, bounded, and shared transparently. Instead, every estimate has grown, every agency has dodged accountability, and the full scope of the public commitment remains deliberately obscured.
This is how large-scale government projects operate in Illinois. The initial pitch is modest and palatable. The approvals come through. The cost projections drift upward. And when someone finally asks for a comprehensive accounting, every office points at the next one while producing nothing. It's not a bug. It's the system functioning exactly as designed.
The Obama Presidential Center was sold as a privately funded gift to Chicago's South Side. What it has become is a monument to the gap between political promises and public accountability. Nineteen acres of parkland for ten dollars, a reserve fund with a million in a vessel built for 470 million, construction costs that nearly tripled, and infrastructure spending that no government entity will tally.
The former president's official records, it turns out, will be maintained by the National Archives at a federal site in Maryland. The building in Jackson Park won't even house them. But it will house the bill.
Sen. John Fetterman went on "Jesse Watters Primetime" Thursday and did something vanishingly rare for a Democrat: he called out one of his own party's most prominent members for her hostility toward Israel.
The target was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who used the Munich Security Conference stage to accuse the United States of enabling "genocide" in Gaza and to demand that American military aid to Israel be conditioned on human rights benchmarks.
Fetterman was not impressed.
"I think that the most troubling thing for her views is she is just, you know, anti-Israel. I mean, and those views and, you know, so clueless — to sit in Germany and accuse Israel of genocide while you're sitting in Germany — and how ignorant that is."
That line does not need a footnote. The congresswoman stood in the country that perpetrated the actual Holocaust and deployed the word "genocide" against the Jewish state defending itself after the worst massacre of Jews since that very Holocaust. The irony writes itself, as Fox News reports.
Ocasio-Cortez used her appearance at the Feb. 13, 2026, Munich Security Conference to push for conditioning U.S. aid to Israel under the Leahy Laws, legislation introduced in 1997 by former Sen. Patrick Leahy that prohibits the Department of Defense and State Department from funding foreign security force units when there is credible information that a unit has committed a "gross violation of human rights."
In her remarks, the congresswoman framed this as a simple matter of legal compliance:
"And, so, I believe that enforcement of our own laws through the Leahy laws — which requires conditioning aid in any circumstance when you see gross human rights violations — is appropriate."
She went further, claiming that unconditional U.S. support for Israel "enabled a genocide in Gaza" and that "thousands of women and children dead" resulted from a failure to enforce conditions on aid.
This is, of course, a familiar playbook. Wrap a radical position in the language of procedural concern. Don't say you want to abandon America's most important Middle Eastern ally. Say you just want to "enforce our own laws." The framing is designed to make the extraordinary sound routine.
But no amount of legal window dressing changes what Ocasio-Cortez is actually arguing: that Israel's military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks constitutes genocide, and that the United States bears moral responsibility for it. That is not a legal argument. It is a political one, and a deeply dishonest one at that.
Fetterman did not stop at criticizing AOC personally. He described her "specifically anti-Israel" stance as representative of a "serious rot" within a subset of the Democratic Party. That phrase carries weight coming from a sitting Democratic senator who has, on other issues, remained firmly in his party's mainstream.
What makes Fetterman's criticism notable is not just that he's willing to say it on Fox News. It's that almost no one else in his caucus will say it anywhere. The Democratic Party's progressive wing has spent the last two years steadily normalizing the "genocide" label for Israel's war against Hamas, a terrorist organization that initiated the conflict by slaughtering civilians. The moderates who know better mostly keep quiet, calculating that silence is cheaper than confrontation.
Fetterman, to his credit, has refused that bargain. He has been one of the only Democrats willing to support Israel publicly and consistently since Oct. 7. His willingness to appear on conservative media and say plainly what many of his colleagues only whisper in private is, at minimum, honest.
That does not make him a conservative. When asked about California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Fetterman acknowledged their disagreements but emphasized the "big tent" nature of the Democratic Party:
"I don't agree with him with some of his, you know, views in certain things. California is a lot different than Pennsylvania, but you know, technically we are just Democrats, and now that's why, you know, the Democratic Party has to be a big tent thing and that's why we can disagree on some things."
A big tent is one thing. But a tent that accommodates both Fetterman's position and AOC's "genocide" rhetoric is not big. It's incoherent.
Beyond her Israel remarks, Ocasio-Cortez's Munich appearance also drew mockery for comments about Taiwan and Venezuela, though the specifics of those flubs circulated more widely on social media than in formal reporting. The congresswoman did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Silence is a choice. When your remarks at a major international security conference spark what the source material describes as "outrage and intense backlash from military and Middle East experts," a serious legislator would clarify or defend. Ocasio-Cortez did neither.
This is the pattern with the progressive left's foreign policy wing. They deploy maximalist moral language on the global stage, accuse allies of the most serious crime in international law, and then treat the predictable blowback as proof that the establishment is afraid of their truth-telling. It is a closed loop. Criticism becomes validation. Backlash becomes branding.
Words matter in international affairs, and "genocide" is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a specific legal designation with specific consequences. Throwing it at Israel while standing in Germany is not bold. It is reckless.
It equates a democratic nation's military campaign against a designated terrorist organization with the systematic extermination of a people. It gives rhetorical ammunition to every bad-faith actor on the global stage who wants to isolate Israel. And it tells Hamas and its sponsors that their strategy of embedding among civilians works, because Western politicians will eventually blame Israel for the carnage that strategy creates.
Ocasio-Cortez frames her position as compassion for the dead. But compassion that cannot distinguish between the arsonist and the fire department is not compassion. It is confusion, elevated to moral certainty.
Fetterman saw it for what it was. Whether enough of his party agrees with him to matter remains the open question. Based on the silence from the rest of the Democratic caucus, the answer is not encouraging.
The rot Fetterman described is not hiding. It flew to Munich and spoke into a microphone.
Two U.S. officials told Reuters that potential military strikes on Iran could target specific individuals and even pursue regime change, options that have emerged in the planning stage if ordered by President Donald Trump. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity and did not say which individuals could be targeted.
The report landed the same day Trump said Friday that he is "considering" a limited military strike on Iran to pressure its leaders into a deal over its nuclear program. The president made the remarks at the White House, where the calculus on Tehran appears to be shifting from diplomacy-first to something with considerably sharper teeth.
This is not abstract saber-rattling. The USS Gerald R. Ford is heading to the Middle East. The U.S. is building up its military presence in the region. And the president has put a clock on the negotiations.
On Thursday, Trump suggested the window for a breakthrough is closing fast, putting the timeline at "10, 15 days, pretty much maximum." He followed that with a statement that left little room for misinterpretation:
"We're either going to get a deal, or it's going to be unfortunate for them."
Last week, when asked directly whether he wanted regime change in Iran, Trump did not equivocate:
"Well it seems like that would be the best thing that could happen."
That is about as explicit as a sitting president gets without issuing a formal directive. The foreign policy establishment will spend the next two weeks debating whether he "really means it." Tehran would be wise to assume he does, as Fox News reports.
Anyone questioning whether this president would actually authorize a strike targeting a specific individual need only consult recent history. In 2020, the Pentagon said Trump ordered the U.S. military strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force, in Iraq.
That operation sent a message that no one in Iran's military hierarchy was beyond reach. The regime understood it then. The fact that targeted strikes on individuals are once again part of the planning conversation suggests the administration wants Tehran to remember it now.
The Soleimani strike was met with the usual chorus of hand-wringing from the foreign policy credentialed class, predictions of World War III, and dire warnings about "escalation." What actually followed was a period of relative Iranian restraint. Strength, it turns out, has a clarifying effect on regimes that mistake American patience for weakness.
A Middle Eastern source with knowledge of the negotiations told Fox News Digital this week that limitations on Iran's short-range missile program are "a firm red line set by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei." The same source provided context on Iran's positions regarding uranium enrichment flexibility and internal views on the talks.
Iran's "firm red lines" are worth examining in context. This is a regime that:
Red lines drawn by a regime with diminishing leverage are not red lines. They are opening bids dressed up as ultimatums. Khamenei can declare whatever he wants sacred and untouchable. The question is what he is willing to concede when the alternative is not a sternly worded letter from the UN, but American military power positioned within striking distance.
What makes this moment distinct is the architecture around it. The administration is not choosing between diplomacy and force. It is using the credible threat of force to make diplomacy possible. These are not competing strategies. One enables the other.
For years, the prevailing wisdom in Washington held that threatening military action against Iran was "counterproductive" because it would "harden" the regime's position. This theory was tested exhaustively during the Obama era and the early Biden years, producing the original Iran nuclear deal, which Iran promptly exploited, and then its effective collapse. Endless diplomatic patience bought nothing but centrifuges spinning faster.
The current approach inverts that logic. You do not enter a negotiation by telegraphing that you will accept any outcome. You enter it by making the cost of no deal unmistakable. The carrier group, the planning for targeted strikes, the public statements about regime change: these are not threats for the sake of threats. They are the architecture of leverage.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House and the Department of War for comment. As of the report, no response was included.
The next 10 to 15 days will reveal whether Tehran's negotiators are empowered to make real concessions or whether they are simply running out the clock, hoping American resolve fades the way it has before. The difference this time is that the man setting the deadline has already demonstrated, in 2020, that he does not bluff.
Iran's leaders have a choice. They can negotiate seriously, or they can test whether the options that "emerged in the planning stage" stay on paper. History suggests they should choose carefully.
A Tucson man detained for hours during a SWAT operation on February 13 says he has nothing to do with the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie. His lawyer confirmed that Luke Daley, 36, was the subject of two search warrants served that day by Pima County deputies and FBI agents. He was released without charges.
His attorney, Chris Scileppi, stated in a local outlet that left no room for ambiguity:
"Mr. Daley has no link whatsoever to Nancy Guthrie and has no information related to her kidnapping."
Scileppi also confirmed that Daley's mother was detained alongside him during the operation. Both walked free. A second ex-con linked to Daley in online speculation, 32-year-old Kayla Day, was already sitting in the Pima County Adult Detention Complex when the raid took place, jailed for allegedly skipping court dates on unrelated charges.
Neither has been accused of involvement in the Guthrie case. Authorities have said almost nothing publicly. A public information officer for the Pima County Sheriff's Department told Fox News Digital simply:
"We have no additional comments at this time besides the information released in our updates."
The February 13 operation drew dozens of law enforcement vehicles to the intersection of Camino de Michael and East Orange Grove Road in Tucson, approximately two miles from Nancy Guthrie's home in the Catalina Foothills neighborhood. The operation went on for hours. A Range Rover was towed from a nearby Culver's restaurant, though it was not immediately clear whether it belonged to Daley, as Fox News reports.
The scene was large enough to rattle the neighborhood. One unnamed neighbor told Fox News Digital he was "pissed," adding that "everyone wants Nancy Guthrie found." The frustration is understandable. Guthrie is believed to have been abducted from her home around 2:30 a.m. on February 1, and weeks later, the public still has precious few answers.
The FBI released photos on February 10, 2025, showing a masked "subject" on Guthrie's property, described as between 5 feet, 9 inches and 5 feet, 10 inches tall. Beyond that, the investigation has produced more questions than clarity.
The fact that Daley and Day have not been charged in connection with the Guthrie case does not mean they are model citizens. Their rap sheets tell a different story entirely.
Daley was arrested by the Marana Police Department on May 15, 2025, accused of:
A vehicle search turned up a 9mm pistol with a loaded magazine, about a thousand opioid pills, and $1,366 in cash. Court documents referenced "indicators of illegal drug transactions" in "plain view." He appeared in court on January 12, is currently out of custody, and his jury trial was rescheduled from February 24 to May 19.
Day was arrested the same day at the same Walmart location and faces her own drug and weapons charges. She was arrested again on March 19, 2025, on four more drug-related charges. A warrant was issued for her arrest in January for missing court dates. She is currently being held without bail. When her February 18 court date arrived, she refused transport. The hearing was rescheduled to February 27, and a judge ordered the Pima County Sheriff's Department to transport Day "by any means necessary."
A thousand opioid pills in one vehicle. A felon with a loaded handgun. A co-defendant who simply refused to show up to her own court date. These are the kinds of cases that illustrate why the revolving door of the criminal justice system remains one of the most urgent public safety failures in the country.
When law enforcement goes quiet, speculation floods the gap. Daley and Day have faced intense online scrutiny since the SWAT operation, with internet sleuths drawing connections that authorities have not endorsed. The proximity of the operation to Guthrie's home, the scale of the law enforcement response, and the involvement of the FBI were enough to set social media ablaze.
Scileppi's statement to local media tried to put the speculation to rest:
"Like the entire Tucson community, both Mr. Daley and his mother are hopeful that Nancy will be returned to her family unharmed."
Day's lawyer, Nicholas Brereton, declined to comment when contacted by Fox News Digital. Scileppi also declined direct comment to Fox News Digital, having already issued his statement through a local outlet.
The online frenzy is a predictable consequence of an information vacuum surrounding a high-profile case. When law enforcement provides nothing beyond boilerplate non-answers, the public does its own detective work. Sometimes that work is insightful. Often it is reckless. In this case, two people with serious criminal histories but no apparent connection to the abduction have become the center of a narrative that authorities have neither confirmed nor convincingly dispelled.
The core reality remains: an 84-year-old woman was taken from her home in the middle of the night, and three weeks later, the public knows almost nothing about who did it or why. The FBI has released grainy photos of a masked figure. Local law enforcement is issuing the bureaucratic equivalent of "no comment." And two felons with drug records are dominating the public conversation about a case they may have nothing to do with.
The Guthrie family deserves answers. The Tucson community deserves transparency. And the investigators working this case deserve the space to do their jobs without online mobs identifying suspects for them.
But silence from authorities is not the same thing as progress. At some point, the people asking questions are not the problem. The people refusing to answer them are.
A Spanish teacher at a public high school in upstate New York was placed on paid administrative leave after she agreed to advise a student-led chapter of Turning Point USA on campus. Jennifer Fasulo, who teaches at Charles W. Baker High School in Baldwinsville, a Syracuse suburb, has been out of the classroom since Jan. 30.
The students asked for the club. The teacher said yes. The district pulled her from her job.
The Baldwinsville Central School District informed parents in a Feb. 10 letter that offered almost nothing in the way of explanation:
"The district can confirm that a staff member has been placed on paid administrative leave while a matter is under review. We are following established administrative and legal procedures, and we are unable to comment further or share additional details at this time."
That's the entire statement. No specifics. No allegations of misconduct. No timeline for resolution. Just bureaucratic boilerplate designed to say something without saying anything at all.
According to her supporters, Fasulo offered to help students establish a Club America chapter on campus, affiliated with Turning Point USA. The request came from the students themselves, not from parents, not from outside political organizers, and not from Fasulo, as New York Post reports.
Former Republican state Senate candidate Caleb Slater, who met Fasulo through church and other Christian circles and has taken up her cause, made this point directly:
"These are students who asked for this organization to be founded, not parents or teachers."
That distinction matters. Public schools routinely host student clubs across every conceivable interest and ideology. Environmental clubs, social justice clubs, LGBTQ alliance groups: these all operate with faculty advisers, and nobody gets suspended for volunteering. But when the club leans conservative, suddenly a "matter is under review."
Club America President Jerry Dygert addressed the Baldwinsville school board directly at its Feb. 9 meeting:
"This teacher is being targeted not because of her performance, but for her political beliefs."
Students have rallied behind Fasulo. A petition demanding her return has collected more than 2,100 signatures as of Thursday. Parents have taken to Facebook to voice support. The community response has been loud and overwhelmingly on the teacher's side.
Slater has gone further, saying Fasulo is being used as a sacrificial lamb to discourage any conservative organizations or opinions at the school. That's a serious charge. It's also one of the district has done nothing to refute,e beyond hiding behind "established administrative and legal procedures."
Others have claimed the school's actions had nothing to do with Turning Point USA and were instead sparked by an interaction Fasulo had with a student about sexual orientation. An unnamed parent alleged that Fasulo questioned her daughter about her sexual orientation while advising an after-school Christian youth group called Youth Alive.
These claims are unsubstantiated.
That's worth pausing on. The district has provided no official reason for the leave. The only competing explanation comes from an anonymous allegation with no corroboration. And yet, the teacher is the one sitting at home while the district "reviews" the matter weeks later with no end in sight.
If the district had a legitimate, non-political reason to place Fasulo on leave, nothing stopped them from saying so. Their silence speaks volumes. When a school district refuses to explain why it removed a teacher, but the only publicly visible trigger is her agreement to sponsor a conservative student club, reasonable people will draw reasonable conclusions.
This is how ideological conformity gets enforced in public education. Not through written policies banning conservative clubs. Those would be struck down immediately. Instead, through soft power: the raised eyebrow in the faculty lounge, the administrative "review" that never quite concludes, the chilling effect on every other teacher who might consider sponsoring something outside the approved ideological menu.
Every teacher in the Baldwinsville Central School District is watching what happens to Jennifer Fasulo. If she's reinstated quietly with no consequences for those who removed her, the message is still clear: helping conservative students will cost you weeks of your professional life and a cloud of suspicion. If she isn't reinstated, the message is worse.
The students at Baker High School did exactly what every civics teacher in America tells students to do. They organized. They found a faculty adviser. They followed the process. And the adults in charge responded by removing the only teacher willing to help them.
More than 2,100 people have signed a petition saying that's wrong. The district hasn't even bothered to explain why it thinks otherwise.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore sat across from CNN's Kasie Hunt on Wednesday and did something politicians do when the facts aren't on their side: he changed the subject.
The Daily Mail reported that Hunt asked Moore directly about a Washington Free Beacon report challenging his oft-repeated claim that the Ku Klux Klan forced his family out of the United States and into exile in Jamaica in the 1920s.
The Free Beacon's reporting, published February 4 by reporter Andrew Kerr, cited church records that appear to show Moore's great-grandfather, Rev. Josiah Johnson Thomas, publicly accepted a transfer to a church in Jamaica to replace a pastor who had passed away unexpectedly.
Not a flight from terror. A professional appointment. Hunt laid the question out plainly:
"They say that the story is - they report - they look at church records, they say the story is not true, that the Ku Klux Klan did not force your family to leave, your family left voluntarily."
Moore's response was not to address the records. It was to redirect:
"They should really ask the Ku Klux Klan about what their activities were during the 1920s."
Hunt had initially raised the matter two minutes earlier. She pressed again, asking whether the church records showing a voluntary departure were wrong. Moore dismissed the Free Beacon entirely, calling it "a right-wing blog" and insisting there was no truth to its reporting.
"There is no truth to what a right-wing blog writes about me. No. There is not. Because I know my family's history."
What Moore calls a smear from a "right-wing blog" is actually documented church history. The Free Beacon's report cited records that appear to indicate an ordinary professional transfer, not a desperate escape from racial violence. A Virginia Commonwealth University map referenced in the reporting suggested there was no KKK chapter operating in Pineville, South Carolina, the family's hometown, at the time of the departure.
Moore has built this narrative into the architecture of his public identity. The story of ancestors fleeing the Klan, forced into exile, is not some minor biographical footnote. It is a centerpiece. He has told it repeatedly. It carries weight in the political marketplace because it is designed to.
And when confronted with documentary evidence that contradicts it, the 47-year-old governor offered no counter-evidence. No competing records. No family documents. Just an appeal to the general horrors of the 1920s South and a dismissal of the outlet that did the reporting.
That is not a rebuttal. That is a deflection.
Moore pivoted to his grandfather, James Joshua Thomas, who was described as a toddler at the time of the 1920s departure. The governor spoke with evident emotion:
"He still returned to this country. He became the first black minister in the history of the Dutch Reform Church. He died while I was in Afghanistan, fighting for this country. And he had a deep Jamaican accent his entire life. And he's maybe the most patriotic man I've ever met."
None of that is in dispute. No one has questioned his grandfather's service, his faith, or his patriotism. The question is narrower and more specific: Did the KKK force the family to leave, or did Rev. Thomas accept a church posting in Jamaica?
Moore told Fox News on Thursday that he stood by his story, adding that the scrutiny was "hurtful" and "offensive." The Free Beacon has stood by its reporting.
There is a pattern in American politics where personal biography becomes political currency, and the temptation to embellish or dramatize that biography grows in proportion to its usefulness. We've seen it before. The details get sharper, the villains clearer, the stakes higher with each retelling.
And when someone pulls the thread, the response is almost always the same: attack the questioner, invoke broader historical suffering, and hope the emotion drowns out the evidence.
Moore denied rumors of a 2028 presidential run back in September. Whether or not those denials hold, his national profile has been rising since he was sworn in as governor in 2023.
A story about ancestors exiled by the Klan is not just a family memory in that context. It is a political asset, carefully deployed, and it demands the same scrutiny that any candidate's biographical claims receive.
Hunt, to her credit, did not let Moore skate on generalities. She pointed to the specific church records. She asked the specific question. Moore chose not to answer it specifically. That choice tells its own story.
When a politician says "ask the Klan," what he really means is: don't ask me.
President Trump told Iran's leaders they "better negotiate a fair deal" during a White House briefing this afternoon, as the United States military surges combat power into the Middle East at a pace not seen since the opening days of major conflicts.
The Daily Mail reported that an additional 50 fighter jets, including F-35s, F-22s, and F-16s, have been deployed to the region in just the past 24 hours. Over 150 U.S. cargo flights have transported weapons and ammunition into the theater. A second aircraft carrier strike group, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is expected to reach the eastern Mediterranean within days.
This is not posturing for the cameras. This is a force structure moving into position.
Earlier this morning, Trump told governors at a working breakfast in the State Dining Room that he is "considering" a limited military strike on Iran. Defence officials have reportedly briefed the president that the U.S. will be ready to begin a war by Saturday.
When a reporter at the packed briefing room asked Trump what his message was to the Iranian people, the president drew a sharp distinction between the regime and the population it governs.
"The people in Iran are a lot different than their leaders, and it is a very sad situation. 32,000 people were killed in a short period of time."
Trump also referenced his previous intervention against Iran's campaign of executions, claiming the regime had planned to hang 837 Iranians by crane.
"I said if you hang even one person… and they gave up the hanging. I feel very badly for the people of Iran they have lived like hell."
That framing matters. Trump isn't building a case against the Iranian people. He's building a case against the regime itself, and doing so by cataloguing its brutality toward its own citizens. The 86-year-old Ali Khamenei presides over a government that kills protesters, hangs dissidents, and runs joint military exercises with the Russian Navy while claiming it's all about "maritime security."
When the president of the United States says he can "destroy a country," that's not bluster from a man who has now deployed two aircraft carriers, a dozen warships, and hundreds of fighter jets to the region.
The military buildup runs parallel to a diplomatic track that appears to be sputtering. Trump's designated negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, met this week in Geneva with Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. The talks lasted three hours. Both sides claimed they "made progress," which in diplomatic language often means neither side moved.
Araghchi reportedly said on Morning Joe that Witkoff and Kushner did not ask Iran for zero uranium enrichment during the discussions.
If true, that signals the administration is taking a staged approach rather than demanding maximum concessions upfront, a negotiating posture that keeps the door open while the military buildup applies the real pressure.
Trump himself had previously considered military action as early as January, following the killing of thousands of protesters inside Iran. Anti-government protests erupted in Tehran around that same period. The regime's response was predictable: violence.
Sources described the ongoing situation as "existential for the regime," and it isn't hard to see why. When a government's primary tool of domestic governance is the execution crane, every challenge becomes a survival question.
The scale of the deployment deserves its own accounting:
The United States military has reportedly drawn up advanced plans for a potential strike on Iran, including options to target specific individuals and actively pursue regime change in Tehran.
The White House is drawing up detailed military plans involving the use of both Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, though the UK has not yet granted permission for use of those sites, according to a report in The Times.
Last week, reports indicated the Pentagon is actively gearing up for a sustained, weeks-long military blitz. Sources warned this could have a "dramatic influence on the entire region."
Israel, which coordinates with the U.S. on Middle Eastern security, has over 200 combat aircraft at its disposal, including F-35s, F-16s, and F-15s. Combined with American assets now in theater, the concentration of air power aimed at Iran is staggering.
There is a school of foreign policy thought, popular on the left and in European capitals, that says escalation provokes conflict.
The competing theory, demonstrated repeatedly in the real world, is that overwhelming force is the only thing that brings regimes like Iran to the table in good faith. You don't negotiate from a position of weakness with a theocracy that hangs its own citizens from cranes.
Trump told the briefing room that Iran is "not allowed to charge them a little fee," a reference to the broader economic and geopolitical leverage Tehran attempts to wield through its nuclear program and regional proxy networks. The implication is clear: the era of paying Iran to behave is over.
The Supreme Court's decision to strike down his sweeping worldwide tax earlier in the day added a domestic frustration to a presidency already operating on multiple fronts simultaneously. But foreign policy is where executive power is least constrained by judicial interference, and the Iran portfolio reflects a commander-in-chief using every tool available to him.
A State Department insider told the Daily Mail that Trump is weighing advice from his cabinet and mulling options on military action. The president, the insider indicated, would provide the "green light" for actions in Iran.
Iran's leadership faces a straightforward calculation. Negotiate seriously and abandon the nuclear ambitions that have destabilized the Middle East for two decades. Or watch the largest concentration of American military power since last year's 12-day conflict continue to build on every horizon.
The carrier groups aren't coming home empty-handed. Either they come home with a deal, or they don't come home soon.