C-SPAN stated on Sunday, clarifying that a Friday caller who identified himself as "John Barron" and unleashed a blistering critique of the Supreme Court's tariff ruling was not the president. The network took the unusual step after the clip rocketed across social media, with viewers convinced they recognized a familiar voice on the other end of the line.
The caller, described as a Republican from Virginia, had phoned in to host Greta Brawner's program to discuss the Supreme Court's six-to-three decision to block the president's sweeping tariff policies under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. What followed was a rant so distinctly Trumpian in cadence, vocabulary, and targets that the internet did what the internet does.
"Look, this is the worst decision you ever made in your life, practically. And Jack's going to agree with me, right, but this is a terrible decision."
The caller then moved to his real targets.
"You have Hakeem Jeffries, who... he's a dope. And you have Chuck Schumer, who can't cook a cheeseburger. Of course, these people are happy. But true Americans will not be happy."
If you read those lines without any context and couldn't identify the rhetorical fingerprints, you haven't been paying attention for the last decade.
"John Barron" is not a name plucked from thin air, the Daily Mail noted. It is the alias Trump reportedly used when feeding information to reporters in the 1980s and 90s, per the Washington Post. Trump had to admit to using the fake name under oath in 1990. So when a caller with that exact name dialed into C-SPAN to deliver a monologue that could have been pulled from a Truth Social post, people noticed.
C-SPAN moved to shut the speculation down:
"The call came from a central Virginia phone number and came while the president was in a widely covered, in-person White House meeting with the governors."
The network added a plug for good measure: "Tune into C-SPAN for the actual president at the State of the Union Address on Tuesday night."
Not everyone bought the explanation. One commenter assembled a detailed timeline: the SCOTUS ruling dropped around 10 a.m., the president's briefing ran from 12:45 to 2:06, he was in the Oval Office until 4:34, and "John Barron called C-SPAN at 3:19." The commenter's conclusion: "Caller ID said where the phone was registered, not where it came from. I call BS."
Whether that skepticism is warranted or just the product of people wanting the story to be true is beside the point. The clip is entertaining either way.
The real story underneath the viral moment is the Supreme Court's decision itself. The Court voted six to three against the president's tariff policies, with $175 billion on the line, ruling that the policy was not authorized under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
What stung most: two of the justices who voted against him were his own appointees. Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett joined Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, John Roberts, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the majority. The president was hosting the National Governors' Association on Friday ahead of the Governors' Dinner the following evening, a visit that had its own drama after Trump blocked Governors Jared Polis and Wes Moore from attending, only to re-extend their invitations.
But the tariff ruling clearly occupied his attention. Trump fired back on Truth Social shortly after the decision, calling it "very unpatriotic."
"What happened today with the two United States Supreme Court Justices that I appointed against great opposition, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, whether people like it or not, never seems to happen with Democrats."
"They vote against the Republicans, and never against themselves, almost every single time, no matter how good a case we have."
That frustration is shared by millions of conservative voters who watched a Republican-appointed majority hand a win to the institutional resistance. The pattern Trump identifies is real: Democratic appointees vote as a bloc with remarkable consistency. Republican appointees break ranks regularly, sometimes on the most consequential cases. Whether that reflects independent judicial reasoning or a lack of ideological spine depends on which side of the aisle you occupy.
The mystery caller, whoever he is, managed to crystallize conservative frustration with the ruling more effectively in ninety seconds of live television than most pundits did all weekend. The language was blunt. The targets were specific. The tone was unmistakable.
C-SPAN says it wasn't the president. The timeline supports that. But the fact that an anonymous caller channeling Trump's exact rhetorical style could dominate a news cycle tells you something about the current moment. The president's voice, real or imitated, still commands the room.
And somewhere in central Virginia, "John Barron" is probably smiling.
A Spanish teacher at Charles W. Baker High School in Baldwinsville, New York, was placed on paid administrative leave in late January after she agreed to help students establish a Club America chapter, the conservative civics organization affiliated with Turning Point USA.
Jennifer Fasulo's offense, as far as anyone can tell, was saying yes to her students.
The Baldwinsville Central School District, a suburb outside of Syracuse, confirmed the leave in a February 10 letter to parents and staff but offered almost nothing in the way of explanation. The district's statement was a masterclass in bureaucratic non-answers:
"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."
No specifics. No allegations. No transparency. Just a teacher removed from her classroom and a district hiding behind boilerplate.
According to Breitbart, the most important detail in this story is one the district clearly hopes people will overlook: the students initiated this. They wanted to start a Club America chapter. They went looking for a faculty adviser, which is standard procedure for any school club. Fasulo agreed to help.
Republican State Senate candidate Caleb Slater, who met Fasulo through his church community, made the point plainly:
"These are students who asked for this organization to be founded, not parents or teachers."
Slater said the teacher is being used as a sacrificial lamb to dissuade conservatives from starting clubs at their schools. That framing is hard to argue with when the district won't provide any other explanation for why a teacher who helped students exercise their right to organize is now sitting at home on paid leave, pending what a petition supporting her describes as termination.
Club America President Jerry Dygert spoke at a February 9 board meeting and didn't mince words about what was happening:
"Our club exists to promote political understanding through civil discourse, removing the one teacher who best embodies those values puts that mission in serious jeopardy."
Dygert also said Fasulo "is being targeted not because of her performance, but for her political beliefs." The district has done nothing to contradict that conclusion.
Here is where the district's own language becomes its most damning evidence. From that same February 10 letter:
"The District is firmly committed to providing a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment for every individual."
"Our policies, practices, and values reflect our belief that all members of our school community deserve to be treated with dignity and respect."
Every individual. All members. Dignity and respect.
Unless, apparently, you're a teacher who helps students start a conservative club. Then you get placed on leave, your name dragged into public view, and your career put in jeopardy while administrators mumble about "established procedures" and refuse to say what you actually did wrong.
This is the pattern in American public education. The word "inclusive" has been hollowed out and repurposed. It now means a specific political orientation is welcome. Deviate from it, and the machinery of administrative review activates. No one will tell you the charge. No one will say your politics are the problem. They don't have to. The process is the punishment.
To their credit, parents and community members aren't letting this slide. A petition supporting Fasulo had collected more than 2,300 signatures as of Sunday. That's a significant number for a suburban school district, and it signals that the silent majority in places like Baldwinsville is getting less silent.
Community members spoke at the board meeting alongside Dygert. The message was consistent: this looks like ideological targeting, and the district's refusal to explain itself only reinforces that impression.
Think about what this teaches every other teacher in the Baldwinsville Central School District. Think about what it teaches every other teacher in New York State. A colleague agreed to sponsor a student club with a conservative orientation, and it cost her the classroom. The specifics of the "review" don't matter for the purposes of the message being sent. The message is: don't.
Don't help those students. Don't associate with that organization. Don't make yourself a target. Keep your head down, run the approved clubs, and nobody gets hurt.
Schools across the country host chapters of every imaginable political and social identity organization. Progressive activism clubs operate freely. But a Club America chapter, focused on civic discourse? That triggers an administrative investigation and a paid leave that sure looks like a prelude to firing.
Conservatives have argued for years that public schools operate as ideological gatekeepers. Districts like Baldwinsville keep proving them right, then issuing statements about "dignity and respect" without a trace of self-awareness.
Jennifer Fasulo said yes to her students. That's all it took.
A Tucson couple discovered a pair of blood-stained gloves and a rock with dried blood in the Arizona desert, roughly a mile from the home of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie. The couple, who asked to remain anonymous, informed the Pima County Sheriff's Department after stumbling upon the suspicious black gloves on the ground about 10 feet apart near Guthrie's Tucson neighborhood.
Guthrie was reported missing three weeks ago. Ring camera video from the night of her disappearance captured a pair of gloves on the hands of an armed intruder. Drops of blood identified as belonging to Guthrie were discovered just outside the front door of her home.
Investigators interviewed the couple, and evidence collection personnel remained at the scene until 2 a.m. The rock reportedly bore at least one blood splatter, and some analysts say it resembled blood spatter patterns. Whether the gloves and the rock are connected to Guthrie's case remains to be determined.
This is not the first set of gloves recovered. Several gloves have been found by investigators, including at least one sent to a DNA lab for testing. According to authorities, those results did not produce a hit in the federal DNA database of known criminals or match other DNA found inside the Guthrie home.
That dead end has pushed the investigation into more advanced territory, as Breitbart reported. Further searches in genealogical databases for possible matches to a suspect's relatives are reportedly underway. Genealogical DNA tracing has cracked cold cases before. Whether it yields results here depends on the quality of the sample and the breadth of the database matches available.
The Feb. 11 discovery in the Catalina Foothills adds another data point for investigators working on a case that has generated enormous public interest. The reward for information has increased from $50,000 to more than $200,000.
Public engagement in the case has been extraordinary and, in some ways, a double-edged sword. The Sheriff's 911 Communications Center has fielded hundreds of daily calls related to the case, with more than 32,000 to date. That figure is 10,000 more than the same period from a year ago.
The volume reflects genuine concern, but it also strains resources. Investigators have urged the public to submit only actionable tips to keep emergency lines available. The FBI tip line, 1-800-CALL-FBI, remains active for anyone with substantive information.
There is a tension in cases like this between the public's desire to help and the operational reality that law enforcement faces. Every call has to be processed. Every lead has to be assessed. When tens of thousands of those calls come in, the ones that matter can get buried under the ones that don't. Good intentions can slow the very investigation people are trying to support.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department is investigating what all available evidence points to as an abduction. An armed intruder on camera. Blood at the front door. An 84-year-old woman is gone.
The gloves found a mile from her home may prove critical, or they may prove coincidental. The desert terrain around Tucson is vast. Items turn up. But the proximity to Guthrie's home, combined with the blood staining, makes them worth every hour investigators spent at that scene.
The lack of a DNA match in federal databases is notable. It means that whoever was inside that home, assuming the tested gloves are connected, has no prior criminal record flagged in the system. That narrows some possibilities and opens others. The genealogical database search is the next logical step, a method that relies not on the suspect having a record but on a relative having submitted DNA to a commercial testing service.
An 84-year-old woman does not vanish from her home without someone knowing something. The physical evidence is accumulating. The public attention is immense. The reward money is substantial. Somewhere between the ring camera footage, the blood at the door, the gloves in the desert, and 32,000 phone calls, there is a thread that leads to Nancy Guthrie.
Investigators need to find it before the trail goes cold.
President Donald Trump declared Friday that voter ID requirements will be in place for this year's midterm elections, with or without congressional approval. The announcement, posted on Truth Social, left no room for ambiguity about his intentions.
"There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!"
In a separate, lengthier post, Trump said he had "searched the depths" of legal arguments and would be "presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future," delivered in the form of an executive order. He did not specify what legal rationale he would rely on, but the message was clear: the executive branch is not waiting on a Senate that may not deliver.
Trump's declaration comes days after the House passed the SAVE America Act on Wednesday by a vote of 218-213. The bill would overhaul federal voting rules in ways that most Americans, when polled honestly, already support. Its key provisions:
The bill drew support from prominent figures, including tech mogul Elon Musk, while MAGA-aligned rapper Nicki Minaj rallied fans to pressure their senators to pass it. That coalition alone tells you something about how broad the appetite for election integrity actually is when you strip away the Beltway spin.
The problem is the Senate, Politico noted. Republicans have privately acknowledged the bill faces uncertain prospects in the upper chamber, which is why Trump's executive order threat carries real strategic weight. It forces the issue. Senators who might have quietly let the SAVE America Act die in committee now face a binary choice: pass the legislation yourselves, or watch the president do it without you.
You need a photo ID to board a plane, buy a beer, pick up a prescription, or open a bank account. The notion that requiring one to vote in a federal election constitutes some kind of radical overreach is a position that exists almost exclusively among political operatives who benefit from the status quo.
Trump has been personally involved in efforts to tighten voter registration standards nationwide, and the SAVE America Act represents the legislative culmination of that push. Requiring proof of citizenship to register is not voter suppression. It is the bare minimum any functioning democracy should expect. Directing states to remove noncitizens from voter rolls is not xenophobia. It is bookkeeping.
The left's opposition to these measures has always rested on a curious foundation: the simultaneous insistence that noncitizen voting never happens and that any effort to prevent it is an existential threat to democracy. If it never happens, the safeguards cost nothing. If it does happen, the safeguards are essential. Either way, the objection collapses under its own weight.
Trump wrote that "if we can't get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted," signaling that his legal team is building a case rooted in existing federal authority rather than new legislative power. The specifics remain to be seen, but the posture matters. This is a president who has learned from his first term that waiting on Congress is often waiting on nothing.
Critics will inevitably frame this as executive overreach. They will discover their concern for constitutional restraint at the precise moment a Republican president acts on an issue that polls well with the American public. The same voices that cheered expansive executive action on climate regulation, student loan transfers, and immigration enforcement pauses will suddenly rediscover the beauty of the legislative process. Set your watch by it.
The deeper question is whether the Senate will make the executive order unnecessary. The SAVE America Act passed the House by the slimmest of margins. Every Republican voted for it. Every Democrat voted against it. That unanimity on the left is worth noting. Not a single Democrat could bring themselves to support the idea that Americans should prove they are, in fact, Americans before casting a ballot.
The legislative path through the Senate remains narrow. The executive order path remains legally untested. But the political ground has shifted. Voter ID is no longer a wish-list item or a campaign applause line. It is an active confrontation between a president willing to act and a political class that has spent years explaining why the simplest election safeguard in the democratic world is somehow impossible here.
Trump is forcing the question. Congress can answer it, or he will.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants you to bring two original forms of identification, copies of each, a Social Security card, and two small passport-style photos just to pick up a shovel and clear snow for the city. Voting, apparently, requires none of the above.
Ahead of Sunday's winter storm, Mamdani announced an "Emergency Snow Shoveler" program, inviting New Yorkers to show up at their local Sanitation Garage to register for paid work clearing streets and sidewalks. The pitch sounded neighborly enough:
"And for those who want to do more to help your neighbors and earn some extra cash, you too can become an Emergency Snow Shoveler."
Then came the fine print. Prospective shovelers had to arrive between 8 am and 1 pm with two original forms of ID plus copies, a social security card, and two 1½-inch square photos. For a temporary gig pushing snow.
The irony was not lost on the internet.
Democrats have spent years insisting that requiring identification to vote is an unconscionable burden, a relic of voter suppression designed to disenfranchise minorities. Sen. Chuck Schumer has gone so far as to label proposed voter ID laws "Jim Crow 2.0."
So when according to the Washington Examiner, a progressive mayor demands more paperwork to hand someone a snow shovel than his party thinks appropriate for casting a ballot in a federal election, people notice.
Comedian Jimmy Failla distilled the absurdity into four words: "Jim Snow 2.0." Former Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon flagged the contradiction directly:
"Here's the catch: Mamdani demands you show 2 forms of ID plus copies and a social security card!"
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin drew the logical connection that Democrats would prefer everyone ignore:
"If Zohran Mamdani supports showing ID to shovel snow, Senate Democrats ought to support showing ID to vote."
Johnson urged the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act by unanimous consent. Don't hold your breath.
When pressed at a Sunday press conference, Mamdani didn't back down. He didn't apologize for the paperwork burden, either. He justified it.
"Federal law requires that employers get authorization and documentation to pay people for their work. We are not allowed to just cut checks for individuals for their work."
He also called the program and its requirements "long-standing," as though precedent dissolves the hypocrisy.
Here's what makes this so instructive. Mamdani is conceding, in plain English, that the government has a legitimate interest in verifying identity before disbursing public funds. He's acknowledging that federal law mandates documentation when someone is getting paid. He's admitting that "just cutting checks" without knowing who you're paying is irresponsible.
Every single one of those principles applies with far greater force to the ballot box. Voting determines who controls the treasury, the courts, and the military. If identification is a reasonable prerequisite for a temporary snow removal gig, on what planet is it an undue burden for choosing the leader of the free world?
This is the feedback loop the left can never escape. They simultaneously argue:
These positions cannot coexist in a coherent governing philosophy. They can only coexist in a political strategy, one that treats identity verification as a tool to be deployed or discarded depending on which outcome Democrats need in a given moment.
When ID requirements keep non-citizens off voter rolls, they're Jim Crow. When ID requirements ensure the city's payroll isn't exploited, they're just good governance. The principle doesn't change. Only the political convenience does.
Mamdani is still new to the mayor's office, and he's already developing a pattern. The same week he demanded two forms of ID for snow shovelers, reports surfaced that he's proposing a 9.5% property tax hike as part of his new city budget. New Yorkers get to pay more and prove more, all for the privilege of living in a city whose leadership treats basic civic accountability as optional when it comes to elections but mandatory when it comes to shoveling a sidewalk.
The snow will melt. The double standard won't.
Nomma Zarubina, a 35-year-old Russian native living in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, pleaded guilty on Thursday to two counts of making false statements: one for lying to the FBI about her contacts with Kremlin spies, and another for falsely claiming on a naturalization application that she had no involvement in prostitution.
She faces up to 10 years in prison at her sentencing on June 11. She is expected to be deported as a result of the felony conviction.
The case reads less like a spy thriller and more like a courtroom sitcom written by someone with no sense of self-preservation.
Zarubina didn't go quietly. According to a federal complaint reported by the New York Post, she confessed during meetings with the FBI in June and July 2024 that she had been working for the Kremlin since December 2020 under the code name "Alyssa." But her relationship with federal law enforcement didn't end at the interview table.
She developed what can only be described as an obsessive fixation on an FBI agent involved in her case. At 4:17 a.m. one day last September, she texted the agent:
"Catch me baby."
She followed that up with another message declaring herself "sooooo bad." When the agent didn't reply, she told him she loved him. Then she called him a "b—h." A judge repeatedly warned her to stop texting the agent. She did not stop. During a single night in November 2025, she messaged him 65 more times.
Judge Laura Swain eventually ruled that Zarubina had breached the conditions of her release on $20,000 bond, citing her continued drinking and her pattern of harassing the agent despite repeated warnings. Zarubina landed behind bars in December.
Judge Swain addressed her directly from the bench:
"I hear the pain that you're in, and I hear the trouble and the conflict that's led us here today, but you're not helping yourself. You're not stopping this conduct."
That is a federal judge exercising extraordinary patience with a defendant who treated her bail conditions like suggestions.
The FBI first met with Zarubina in October 2020 as part of a probe into her close friend Elena Branson, who was associated with an organization called the Russian Center New York. Branson was indicted in 2022 for allegedly spreading Russian foreign influence through that organization. She fled to Moscow during the probe and is still at large.
During interviews in 2021, 2022, and 2023, Zarubina denied having any contact with Russian spy agents. Court papers show she maintained those denials across multiple years of federal interviews. She only came clean during meetings in June and July 2024, when she admitted to working under a Kremlin code name for nearly four years.
She also name-dropped Maria Butina in her communications, texting that she guessed "Butina got more attention." Butina is an admitted Russian agent who served 15 months in prison for infiltrating conservative networks to influence U.S. Republican politics. The comparison was Zarubina's, not the government's, and it tells you something about how she viewed her own situation.
Federal prosecutors in April 2025 accused Zarubina of participating in a scheme to transport women to engage in prostitution connected to an unidentified massage parlor in East Brunswick, New Jersey. This was the basis for the second false statement charge: she lied on her naturalization application about any involvement in prostitution.
Zarubina told the judge that the FBI agent had "influenced" her emotionally, saying her life "became so different" after meeting him and that he "controlled me emotionally." She also offered a rather telling assessment of American law enforcement:
"They frame people, they build cases, you know."
She said she understood communicating with the FBI because "they actually work the same as Russians work." The woman who spent years lying to federal agents about her Kremlin ties now wants sympathy for being caught.
Dmitry Valuev, president of Russian America for Democracy in Russia, said his organization had flagged Zarubina as suspicious for years before her arrest. They had tracked her work for what Valuev called a "shady Russian nonprofit" serving as its representative to the United Nations.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Zarubina had a friend indicted for Russian influence operations who fled the country. She was flagged by a watchdog organization. She lied to federal investigators for three consecutive years. And when the walls finally closed in, she responded by bombarding an FBI agent with late-night texts and comparing herself to a convicted Russian spy.
The spectacle of Zarubina's behavior, the 4 a.m. texts, the defiant messages, the courtroom theatrics, can obscure the more serious reality underneath. A foreign national operated under a Kremlin code name on American soil for years. She lied to the FBI repeatedly. She was tied to both a Russian influence network and a prostitution ring. And she managed to do all of this while living in Brooklyn and apparently interacting with the United Nations.
This is the kind of case that should prompt uncomfortable questions about how many others are operating in plain sight. Zarubina wasn't exactly subtle. She wasn't a master of tradecraft. She was eventually undone by her own inability to stop texting a federal agent in the middle of the night.
The ones who know how to stay quiet are the ones who should worry us.
Zarubina now sits behind bars, awaiting sentencing, expected to be deported after a felony conviction. She told the court her life "seems like a tragedy" because people from many countries think she was a spy, but "don't know the whole story."
A federal jury won't need the whole story. The guilty plea told it.
King Charles was warned six years ago that Prince Andrew's business entanglements were damaging the Royal Family, according to a whistleblower email now at the center of a widening scandal that has already landed the ex-Duke of York in police custody.
The Mail on Sunday revealed that in August 2019, a whistleblower sent an email to Charles, then Prince of Wales, through the royal lawyers Farrer & Co. The message was blunt: David Rowland, the controversial millionaire financier orbiting Andrew for years, had "abused the Royal Family's name."
Andrew was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of misconduct in public office. He was released under investigation eleven hours later. The charge carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, though he has not been formally charged.
The question now reverberating through British politics is simple: what did the Palace do with that warning, and why did it take a police arrest to force the issue?
As reported by the Daily Mail, the August 2019 email did not mince words. Addressed to Charles through Farrer & Co, it laid out what the whistleblower described as a pattern of financial entanglement between Andrew and David Rowland that put the monarchy's reputation at risk.
"HRH the Duke of York's actions suggest that his Royal Highness considers his relationship with David Rowland more important than that of his family."
A second email, sent directly to David Rowland, copied in Charles's private secretary Clive Alderton and the late Queen's solicitor Mark Bridges at Farrer & Co. That message was even more direct:
"The evidence provided unequivocally proves that you have abused the Royal Family's name."
The whistleblower alleged that Rowland "paid HRH The Duke of York to procure a Luxembourg Banking Licence" for his private bank, Banque Havilland. That bank had its licence withdrawn in 2024 by the European Central Bank, a decision it is currently appealing.
So by 2019, the Palace had a documented warning. Andrew's name was already radioactive thanks to the now infamous photograph of him with 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre and his links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. And yet the wheels of accountability barely turned.
The financial relationship between Andrew and the Rowland family stretches back decades. Messages seen by the Mail on Sunday appear to show that Andrew allowed Jonathan Rowland, David's son, to effectively join in with his official duties as a taxpayer-funded trade envoy between 2001 and 2011.
The details are striking:
Andrew once told Epstein that Rowland was his "trusted money man." Let that sink in. A member of the Royal Family, serving as a taxpayer-funded trade envoy, allegedly blended his official diplomatic duties with the private financial interests of a man he vouched for to a convicted paedophile.
Jonathan Rowland, responding to the revelations, dismissed the allegations. He said the emails were "stolen" and had been "extensively reported" previously, adding: "You can't procure a banking licence, that's an idiotic suggestion." He claimed "no recollection" of other matters and offered "no idea" when pressed further.
On Saturday, MPs called for police to study the evidence acquired by the Mail on Sunday. The responses crossed party lines, which tells you how politically toxic Andrew has become.
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp did not hold back:
"These explosive new MoS findings are shocking, but not surprising. The police should investigate them at once. Andrew has acted disgracefully and deserves nothing less than to face justice over his deals, something which has been denied to Epstein's victims for too long. No one is above the law."
Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel struck a similar tone, noting that "each day new revelations appear and they are all horrific" and calling for urgent police investigations.
Reform UK's Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick was equally forceful:
"The police must investigate the latest revelation urgently. No stone must be left unturned to establish the truth. Andrew has done his best to wreck Britain's reputation on the world stage through his association with Epstein."
There are now growing calls for the Government to introduce legislation to remove Andrew from the line of succession. He remains eighth in line to the throne. Defence minister Luke Pollard said stripping him of his right to succession was the "right thing to do."
The Metropolitan Police has started the process of identifying and contacting former and serving officers who may have worked closely with Andrew in a protection capacity. The force asked those officers to consider carefully whether anything they saw or heard during their period of service might be relevant to ongoing reviews.
"They have been asked to consider carefully whether anything they saw or heard during that period of service may be relevant to our ongoing reviews and to share any information that could assist us."
The Met refused to confirm how many current and former staff members were involved. A British ambassador reportedly warned the Government more than two decades ago about Andrew's associations. A British diplomat in Moscow also raised concerns. The warnings piled up. The action did not.
Buckingham Palace's response to the whistleblower revelations was characteristic. A Palace source said that "given the ongoing police investigation into Andrew, it would not be possible to give any comment on the whistleblower's email." The source added that "any relevant material in the possession of the MoS should be shared with the appropriate authorities."
That is a remarkable posture for an institution that received a direct, documented warning in 2019 about one of its own members allegedly selling access and blending royal duties with private financial schemes.
Gloria Allred, a lawyer who has represented 27 Epstein victims, urged the King and the Prince and Princess of Wales to give statements to police. Speaking to the BBC, she laid out the stakes plainly:
"King Charles and all the members really of the Royal Family have said that they support the victims. The best way is for them to also do interviews with the police if they are requested to do so. Or they could volunteer to do so. I would respectfully request that they speak out about what Andrew may have ever told them about his role with Jeffrey Epstein."
The Andrew saga is not just a story about one reckless royal. It is a case study in how institutions prioritize self-preservation over accountability. The warning signs were everywhere. A whistleblower put them in writing. Diplomats raised alarms. The financial entanglements were not subtle. A man paying off your £1.5 million loan while you carry the title of trade envoy is not a grey area.
For years, the British establishment treated Andrew's behavior as an embarrassment to be managed rather than a potential crime to be investigated. The same instinct that kept Epstein's network intact across multiple countries, the instinct to look away because the names involved are too important, operated in plain sight within the monarchy itself.
Now that an arrest has been made, every institution that received a warning and filed it away will face a reckoning. The emails exist. The timeline is clear. The question is no longer what Andrew did. It is who knew, when they knew it, and why they chose silence.
The Justice Department stepped into California's redistricting fight on Thursday, seeking to intervene in a lawsuit that aims to stop the state from implementing new congressional maps approved by voters just last week. The maps would create five additional House districts favoring Democrats, and Attorney General Pam Bondi isn't mincing words about what's really going on.
Bondi accused Gov. Gavin Newsom of executing a power grab wrapped in the language of voting rights:
"California's redistricting scheme is a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process."
The DOJ's argument is straightforward. Justice officials contend the map violates the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and the Voting Rights Act by factoring in racial demographics when drawing new districts. In other words, California Democrats used race as a tool to engineer a partisan outcome, then asked voters to bless it.
The story begins with a move that should have drawn far more scrutiny than it did. Newsom and Democrats in California overrode their state's independent redistricting commission and proposed a ballot measure for new congressional maps. That ballot measure, Proposition 50, went before voters and passed by an overwhelming margin.
The California Republican Party filed suit the day after the election. Now the DOJ is joining the fight, according to the New York Post.
DOJ lawyers laid out the core of the legal case plainly:
"Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50."
The lawsuit cites public comments from Paul Mitchell, the redistricting expert who helped draw the new maps, to argue that California Democrats factored in the distribution of Latino voters in each district to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The legal theory here matters: compliance with the VRA doesn't give states a blank check to sort voters by race in ways that conveniently produce five extra Democratic seats.
Federal courts have been prohibited from policing partisan gerrymandering since a sweeping 2019 Supreme Court ruling. That decision essentially told voters and state legislatures that political line-drawing was their problem to solve, not the judiciary's.
But racial gerrymandering is a different animal entirely. The Constitution still bars it. And the DOJ argues that California dressed up a racial gerrymander in the clothing of partisan strategy, or perhaps the reverse. Either way, the use of racial data to achieve partisan ends lands squarely in territory the courts have never blessed.
The Supreme Court heard arguments last month in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could further clarify where these lines fall. California's maps may soon become the next major test.
Bondi noted that Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general and head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, has recused herself from the case. Dhillon was previously the vice chair of the California Republican Party, making the recusal both appropriate and notable.
California's map didn't materialize in a vacuum. President Donald Trump successfully pushed Texas to redraw its maps to create five GOP-leaning districts. Republicans in Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina followed suit with new maps of their own. Democrats, watching seats shift, responded with their own plays:
Both parties are fighting over the same chessboard. The difference the DOJ is drawing here isn't about partisanship. It's about the method. Using racial data to achieve political outcomes isn't just aggressive redistricting. It's a constitutional violation.
Newsom spokesperson Brandon Richards offered what might generously be called confidence:
"These losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court."
The "losers lost at the ballot box" line captures everything wrong with how California Democrats have approached this. Voter approval doesn't immunize a law from constitutional challenge. Plenty of ballot measures have passed overwhelmingly and been struck down. Popular doesn't mean legal.
This is the same Gavin Newsom who championed an independent redistricting commission as a model of good governance, right up until the moment it stopped producing the results he wanted. Then he and his party simply went around it. They bypassed the very institution designed to prevent exactly the kind of partisan manipulation the DOJ is now alleging.
Bondi put it directly:
"Governor Newsom's attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand."
The legal fight will turn on whether California's mapmakers used race as a predominant factor in drawing district lines. The public comments from Mitchell, the redistricting expert, could prove damaging. When the people who drew the maps talked openly about sorting voters by ethnicity, they created a paper trail that DOJ attorneys will exploit relentlessly in court.
California Democrats are betting that voter approval provides political armor thick enough to survive judicial review. The Justice Department is betting that the Constitution still means what it says about equal protection.
One of those bets is going to lose. And if the DOJ prevails, five Democrat seats evaporate before anyone ever casts a vote in them.
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.