Two House Democrats are demanding the Justice Department appoint a special counsel to investigate Attorney General Pam Bondi, accusing her of perjury over her testimony that no evidence links President Trump to criminal conduct in the Epstein files.
Reps. Ted Lieu of California and Dan Goldman of New York sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche requesting the probe. Their basis: Bondi's statement at a February 11 House Judiciary Committee hearing that "there is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime," which they claim is contradicted by documents the DOJ itself has released.
The letter pulls no punches in its language:
"We request that you immediately appoint a special counsel to investigate Attorney General Bondi for committing perjury. America cannot have a liar and a criminal as our top law enforcement officer."
Bondi dismissed the effort entirely. "This is so ridiculous," she said, adding that Democrats are "trying to deflect from all the great things Donald Trump has done."
The dispute traces back to a heated exchange between Lieu and Bondi earlier this month. During the hearing, Lieu showed video footage of a younger Trump at a party alongside convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and asked whether underage girls were present. He also presented what was described as a document containing unverified allegations from a limo driver about Trump. The Hill reported.
Bondi held firm. When Lieu pressed her, she fired back:
"Don't you ever accuse me of committing a crime."
Goldman, for his part, pointed to a 21-page internal slideshow presentation released by the DOJ that summarized witness testimony. Democrats argue this material contradicts Bondi's blanket claim that no evidence exists. The DOJ has a different view of what constitutes "evidence" versus unverified accusations, a distinction the Democrats in question appear uninterested in drawing.
The controversy deepened when journalist Roger Sollenberger first reported that serial numbers tracking various documents showed a woman had spoken to the FBI four times and that roughly 50 pages related to her interviews were not publicly released. This fueled Democratic claims that the DOJ was suppressing material.
Rep. Robert Garcia, ranking member of the Oversight Committee, said he personally reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the Justice Department. His statement escalated matters considerably:
"Oversight Democrats can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes. Oversight Democrats will open a parallel investigation into this."
The DOJ responded directly, explaining that a file was temporarily removed for victim redactions and was backed up by Thursday. On X, the department pushed back hard against the Democratic narrative:
"Oversight Democrats should stop misleading the public while manufacturing outrage from their radical anti-Trump base. The Justice Department has repeatedly said publicly AND directly to NPR prior to deadline – NOTHING has been deleted."
The department further clarified that all responsive documents have been produced unless they fall into specific categories: duplicates, privileged material, or documents connected to an ongoing federal investigation.
The House Oversight Committee minority spotted what they believed was an opening. In a post on X, they wrote that records of FBI interviews with a woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her as a child "aren't duplicates or shouldn't be privileged," then asked pointedly whether DOJ was confirming an active, ongoing federal investigation into the president.
It was a rhetorical trap, designed to force DOJ into either admitting a live investigation or conceding that the files should be public. The DOJ did not take the bait. Instead, the department fired back at Lieu specifically:
"First: these salaciously insane accusations are in the library- UNredacted. Second: they were found to have ZERO credibility. Ted Lieu is a disgrace, who pushes baseless accusations to further his political ambition. Do better, Ted."
Lieu told The Hill that Bondi "should be prosecuted" and urged Blanche to act before it was too late. His framing was characteristically dramatic:
"If Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche doesn't want to be complicit in a cover up, and go down with his ship, then I sure hope he responds and appoints a special counsel."
Strip away the theatrics, and the picture comes into focus. Democrats have spent weeks trying to weaponize the Epstein file release, the very transparency they demanded, into a political bludgeon. The DOJ released the documents. It released the slideshow. It made unredacted accusations publicly available. And the department has stated plainly that those accusations were found to have zero credibility.
Yet Democrats are treating unverified allegations as though they are proven facts, then accusing the Attorney General of perjury for not treating them the same way. The logic is circular: the existence of an accusation is treated as "evidence," and anyone who distinguishes between an accusation and evidence is labeled a liar.
This is not oversight. It is opposition research dressed in subpoena power.
The call for a special counsel is itself revealing. Democrats know Todd Blanche will not appoint one. They know the legal threshold for perjury requires proof that a witness knowingly made a false statement, not that she characterized disputed, unverified claims differently than her political opponents would prefer. The demand exists to generate headlines, not indictments.
Consider the sequence:
Every step of compliance becomes the predicate for the next accusation. The goal is not truth. The goal is perpetual investigation.
Bondi said it plainly: "There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime." The DOJ, which has reviewed the actual files, says the accusations in question have zero credibility. Democrats can disagree with that assessment. But disagreement is not perjury, and an unverified allegation is not a conviction.
The special counsel's request will go nowhere. But it was never meant to arrive.
Federal prosecutors visited Nancy Guthrie's property in Tucson, Arizona, on Wednesday to assist the FBI with what the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona described only as a "routine legal process." Federal agents spent several hours at the home on Wednesday afternoon, with Fox News Digital's Flight Team capturing drone footage of agents walking in and out of the house and around the backyard. Several cars were observed going in and out of the driveway.
The 84-year-old Guthrie was last seen in late January. Investigators have not yet publicly identified a person of interest or suspect in her disappearance, and the vague "routine legal process" language from prosecutors offers little clarity about what, exactly, brought them to the property in force.
What is clear: the investigation is intensifying, and the Guthrie family is not waiting for the government to crack this alone.
On Tuesday morning, Savannah Guthrie, the NBC "Today Show" host and Nancy's daughter, posted an Instagram video announcing a family reward of up to $1 million for her mother's recovery. The family also pledged a $500,000 donation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Savannah Guthrie's words carried the weight of someone holding faith and grief in the same hand:
"I'm coming on to say it is day 24 since our mom was taken in the dark of night from her bed. And every hour and minute and second and every long night has been agony since then."
"We still believe, we still believe in a miracle. We still believe that she can come home. Hope begets hope. As my sister says, we are blowing on the embers of hope."
As reported by Fox News, she also acknowledged the possibility the family dreads most. Nancy Guthrie "may already be gone," Savannah said, and "may have already gone home to the Lord that she loves, and is dancing in heaven, with her mom and her dad and with her beloved brother Pierce, and with our daddy."
There is no spinning that. A daughter is publicly reckoning with the possibility that her mother has been murdered, while still summoning the strength to beg anyone with information to come forward. That deserves respect regardless of where you fall on any political spectrum.
The family's reward isn't just an act of desperation. Retired FBI Agent Jason Pack told Fox News Digital it has the potential to reshape the entire investigation. The math matters. The FBI had offered $100,000. The 88-Crime tip line stood at $102,500. The family just raised the price of silence to seven figures.
Pack laid out the tactical reasoning with precision:
"The $1 million announcement is also a direct market disruption. The FBI has a $100,000 reward. 88-Crime is at $102,500. By introducing a private family reward at $1 million, the Guthries just changed the calculus for anyone sitting on information: a driver who saw something, an accomplice having second thoughts, a family member of the suspect weighing loyalty against a million dollars. That is a number that can fracture criminal conspiracies."
He also explained the psychological dimension. The reward applies pressure on anyone involved in what investigators believe was Nancy Guthrie being taken from her home.
"It applies psychological pressure on any accomplices. Ransom schemes involving multiple people are inherently unstable. The more time passes, the more the financial disparity between holding out and collecting $1 million starts eating at the weakest link."
Pack's assessment boils down to a simple principle: loyalty is cheap until someone puts a price on it. A million dollars makes co-conspirators into competitors. It also generates a fresh news cycle, sending people "back to their phones scrolling through memories of anything unusual they saw in the Catalina Foothills in January."
The early results suggest it's working. According to NBC News, over 750 tips have poured in since Tuesday. Sources with knowledge of the family's thinking told Fox News Digital that tens of thousands of leads have been coming in organically.
The FBI previously released photos showing a "subject" on Nancy Guthrie's property, and investigators have been working to identify the clothing and other items visible in those images. Sources told Fox News Digital that one of the Nest doorbell camera images released by the FBI was taken on a different day than the others, though Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos pushed back on that reporting, dismissing it as "speculation."
The gap between what law enforcement knows and what it has shared publicly remains wide. No suspect. No person of interest. A "routine legal process" that required federal prosecutors and several hours inside the home of a missing woman. None of that language inspires confidence that this case is anywhere near resolution.
That gap is precisely why the family's decision to go public with a massive reward matters. When official channels move slowly, private initiative can change the equation. Pack called the $1 million figure a way to preserve "moral offramps" for anyone with information, sending a clear message to potential accomplices:
"The message is: your partners are not going to protect you. We will. It preserves moral offramps."
An 84-year-old woman was taken from her bed in the middle of the night. Nearly a month later, investigators still cannot publicly name who did it. The family has now done what families should never have to do: outbid the federal government's reward by a factor of ten to shake information loose.
The Guthrie family's faith, their willingness to spend significantly and plead publicly, and their refusal to surrender to despair represent something worth honoring. Savannah Guthrie spoke of blowing on the embers of hope. A million dollars is a lot of oxygen.
Someone in Tucson knows something. The question is whether the price just got high enough to make them talk.
The U.S. men's ice hockey team capped its Olympic gold medal celebration with a whirlwind tour through Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, complete with an Air Force flight into the capital, a visit with President Trump in the Oval Office, and a standing ovation at the State of the Union address. It was, by any measure, a triumphant homecoming for a group of Americans who just won gold representing their country on the world stage.
Naturally, the internet found something to be angry about.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared a photo on social media posing with deputy director of communications Margo Martin and several members of Team USA, including Boston Bruins goalie Jeremy Swayman, Winnipeg Jets goalie Connor Hellebuyck, Jack Hughes, Quinn Hughes, and Buffalo Sabres forward Tage Thompson. Most of the players wore red and white USA hats. Thompson chose a different one.
He wore a Make America Great Again hat. And for that, the outrage machine cranked to life.
Social media critics descended on the photo almost immediately. Thompson faced special criticism online, with critics flocking to the comments on his recent Instagram post to attack him for wearing the MAGA hat. The backlash was described as widespread, though, as with most online outrage cycles, the fury was loud but thin on substance.
Think about what actually happened here. An American athlete won an Olympic gold medal for his country, visited the White House at the invitation of the sitting president, and put on a hat bearing the president's campaign slogan while standing in the president's house. The scandal, apparently, is that he didn't seem embarrassed about any of it. Fox News reported.
This is the state of progressive cultural enforcement in 2026. You can win gold for America, but you'd better not act too American while celebrating it.
Trump invited both the men's and women's gold medal teams to the White House and extended an invitation to the State of the Union address. The men's team accepted and made the trip. The women's team did not attend, citing schedule conflicts.
During Tuesday's address, Trump said the women's gold medal team would make a trip to the White House, though he did not say when.
In a video of the president's phone call with the men's team immediately after their win, Trump joked that if he didn't invite them, he would "probably be impeached." It's the kind of lighthearted moment that used to be unremarkable when athletes visited the White House. A president congratulates champions. Champions shake hands. Everyone moves on.
But the rules changed somewhere around 2017, and they only seem to apply in one direction. When athletes visited Barack Obama's White House wearing his campaign gear, no one demanded they apologize. No one swarmed their social media accounts. The expectation now is that athletes must perform a careful neutrality in the presence of a Republican president, or face digital punishment from strangers who weren't on the ice, didn't win anything, and contribute nothing beyond their indignation.
What the online mob wants you to focus on is the hat. What they don't want you to notice is the picture underneath it: a group of young American men who just beat the world, standing in the White House, grinning. Leavitt welcomed them. The president hosted them. They received a standing ovation at the State of the Union. That's the story.
The MAGA hat outrage reveals something the left would rather not confront. These athletes weren't coerced. Thompson wasn't tricked into putting on the hat. He's a professional hockey player, not a hostage. He made a choice, and the response from progressives tells you everything about how they view personal expression when it cuts against their preferences.
Dissent is celebrated, but only the approved kind. Wearing a Pride flag to the White House is brave. Wearing the sitting president's hat to the White House is a betrayal. The standard isn't the principle. It's allegiance.
The tradition of championship teams visiting the White House exists for a simple reason. These athletes represented the United States. They won. The president, whoever he is, congratulates them on behalf of the country. It's one of the few remaining civic rituals that should transcend partisan bickering.
The men's team showed up. They took the Air Force flight. They shook hands in the Oval Office. They stood for the State of the Union and received the ovation they earned. Some wore USA hats. One wore a MAGA hat. All of them wore gold medals.
The people screaming about Tage Thompson's hat didn't win anything on Tuesday. He did.
Justice Clarence Thomas concurred with Tuesday's unanimous Supreme Court decision in Villarreal v. Texas but refused to join the majority opinion, arguing it "needlessly expands our precedents" on how trial judges may restrict communication between defendants and their attorneys during recesses.
The case centered on a straightforward question: how far can a trial judge go in limiting what a defendant and his lawyers discuss during a break in testimony? The Court answered unanimously, ruling against the defendant. But Thomas saw the majority reaching beyond what the case required, and he said so.
David Villarreal was defending himself against murder charges in Texas when his trial testimony was interrupted by a 24-hour overnight recess. The trial judge instructed Villarreal's attorneys not to "manage his testimony" during the break. The restriction was narrow. Villarreal's lawyers could still discuss other matters, including possible sentencing issues. They simply could not coach their client on the testimony he was in the middle of delivering.
Villarreal was ultimately convicted. His attorneys appealed, arguing that the trial judge's restrictions on communication violated his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The case climbed its way to the Supreme Court. Fox News shares.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson penned the majority opinion, which stated that court precedent allowed judges to restrict attorneys and clients from discussing testimony in the middle of a trial. The Court ruled against Villarreal's argument. So far, so good.
Thomas agreed with the outcome. He did not agree with how the majority got there. His concurrence argued that the trial judge's original order was already consistent with existing precedent and that the majority's opinion introduced unnecessary new rules where none were needed.
"The trial judge's order here complied with our precedents."
Thomas laid out exactly what the trial judge had done. The judge instructed defense counsel not to "discuss what you couldn't discuss with [Villarreal] if he was on the stand in front of the jury," and explained that "you couldn't confer with him while he was on the stand about his testimony." That restriction tracked existing law. It was measured. It was specific.
The problem, in Thomas's view, was that the majority went further than the facts demanded. Rather than simply affirming the trial judge's order under existing precedent, the majority opinion purported to announce a new rule: that a defendant has a constitutional right to "discussion of testimony" so long as that discussion is "incidental to other topics," such as plea advice or strategy.
"I am unable to join the majority opinion because it unnecessarily expands these precedents. It purports to 'announce' a 'rule' under which a defendant has a constitutional right to 'discussion of testimony' so long as that discussion is 'incidental to other topics.'"
This is Thomas at his most consistent. He has spent decades warning the Court against doing more than a case requires, against the judicial habit of using narrow disputes as vehicles for broad pronouncements. A unanimous outcome masked a real disagreement about judicial restraint.
There is a meaningful difference between a court saying "this trial judge acted within established law" and a court saying "we are now announcing a new constitutional rule about when defendants can discuss testimony with their lawyers." The first resolves a case. The second creates precedent that will ripple through courtrooms for years.
Trial judges across the country manage testimony recesses every day. They make practical decisions about what attorneys and defendants can discuss, balancing the integrity of testimony against the right to counsel. Those judges now have a new "rule" to contend with, one that distinguishes between direct discussion of testimony and discussion that is merely "incidental" to it. That line is not as clean as it sounds. Defense attorneys will test it. Prosecutors will challenge it. And lower courts will have to sort out what "incidental" means in practice.
Thomas saw this coming. His objection was not about the outcome for Villarreal. It was about what the majority opinion will mean for the next case and the one after that.
Conservative jurisprudence has long held that courts should decide the case in front of them and resist the temptation to legislate from the bench. That principle applies even when the result is unanimous. Especially then. A unanimous decision carries enormous weight. When the entire Court agrees on an outcome, but the majority opinion sweeps more broadly than necessary, the new precedent arrives with the full force of nine justices behind it, even if the breadth was never truly contested.
Thomas's concurrence is a reminder that unanimity on the result does not mean unanimity on the reasoning. And reasoning is where law gets made.
The trial judge in Texas did his job. The Supreme Court could have simply said so. Thomas wanted to leave it there. The majority did not.
President Donald Trump delivered his first State of the Union address since his 2024 election victory on Tuesday night, and CNN's own numbers told the story the network didn't want to hear. A CNN Instant Poll taken in the immediate aftermath found that 64 percent of viewers said Trump is moving the country in the right direction.
Before the speech even started, only 54 percent of watchers said he was moving the country to their liking. By the time he finished, that number had jumped ten points. The audience watched, they listened, and they were persuaded.
Trump's address clocked in at 108 minutes, beginning at 9:11 p.m. ET and concluding at 10:59 p.m. ET. That shattered the record for the longest State of the Union speech ever delivered. Trump had already set the mark earlier with his 2025 joint address to Congress at 100 minutes on the dot. For 25 years before that, former President Bill Clinton's 2000 address held the record at 89 minutes.
According to Breitbart, the speech was long. The audience stayed. And the numbers climbed.
That combination matters more than any pundit's post-game breakdown. A president who can hold a room and a nation watching at home for nearly two hours, and come out with stronger approval than when he started, is a president who is connecting. Critics have spent years insisting that Trump's appeal is shallow, that it evaporates the moment he goes long-form. The CNN poll suggests the opposite: the more people heard, the more they agreed.
Not everyone at CNN took the numbers gracefully. The network's own Abby Phillip sneered at the president, calling Trump's bestowing of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, two Medals of Honor, two Purple Hearts, and the Legion of Merit "gameshow type moments" that "he had to do" because his other messages are a "hard pill for Americans to swallow."
Think about what that framing reveals. A president honors military heroes and distinguished Americans with the nation's highest recognitions, and CNN's analysis is that it was a distraction technique. The medals weren't earned. The moments weren't genuine. They were props, apparently, in a production designed to make bad medicine go down easier.
This is the instinct that keeps eroding media credibility. A normal person watches a Purple Heart ceremony and feels something. A cable news commentator watches the same ceremony and reaches for cynicism. Then the poll results come in, and the commentator cannot fathom why the audience responded the way it did.
The ten-point swing during the speech deserves attention. Pre-speech, viewers were already a somewhat favorable audience, as is typical of State of the Union viewership. But moving from 54 percent to 64 percent means Trump didn't just play to his base. He expanded his support in real time, with people watching every word.
That's not something you accomplish with "gameshow type moments." You accomplish it with a message that resonates. You accomplish it by talking about things people actually care about, and talking about them for long enough that the substance lands.
The media class has a persistent theory that Trump succeeds despite his speeches, that his support exists in some parallel universe disconnected from what he actually says. CNN's own data contradicts that theory every time they bother to measure it. The speech didn't hurt him. It helped him. Considerably.
Instant polls have their limitations. The sample skews toward people who chose to watch, which naturally tilts toward a more favorable audience. CNN has acknowledged this dynamic in past cycles. But the relevant comparison isn't between the poll sample and the general population. It's the movement within the sample itself.
The people who tuned in on Tuesday night were more supportive of Trump's direction after listening to him than they were before. That's the signal. And it's a signal that 108 minutes of direct presidential communication, unfiltered by chyrons and panel discussions, moved opinion in a direction CNN spends most of its airtime trying to reverse.
There's a lesson in that for every network that will refuse to learn it. When Americans hear the president speak for himself, at length, without interruption, they tend to like what they hear. The middlemen lose their power. The framing dissolves. And the polls move.
CNN published the numbers. Their own anchors spent the rest of the night explaining why the numbers didn't mean what they plainly meant. That gap between the data and the narrative is the whole story of modern political media, captured in a single evening.
Former first lady Michelle Obama used her podcast this week to argue that American society sends women contradictory messages about motherhood, telling them not to have abortions while failing to create the support systems mothers need. The remarks came during an episode of "IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson," where Obama fielded a question from a first-time mother struggling with the transition back to work.
The listener, identified as Abigail, is a high school music teacher who took a year off to care for her child and was seeking advice about reentering the workforce. Obama, speaking alongside actress Halle Bailey, used the question as a springboard into broader commentary on maternity leave, hormonal recovery, and what she characterized as a culture that doesn't "fully respect and value childbirth."
Obama's central claim is that the country's posture toward motherhood is incoherent. She framed the tension this way:
"We don't live in a society that fully respects and values childbirth. Like, we want people to have them – 'don't have an abortion!'"
She went on to argue that maternity leave policies are inadequate, calling them "ridiculous" and noting that most offer only three to four months. In her telling, that timeline doesn't give a woman's body time to heal, let alone allow hormones to stabilize while breastfeeding. Fox News reported.
"Your hormones are telling you to do one thing. And the societal structure is telling you to do something else."
Obama then pivoted to advice for the listener, encouraging her to accept less than full commitment in certain areas of life. She said she personally likes giving 100% to everything, but that mothers should forgive themselves for falling short of that standard.
"Sometimes 40% is OK. Sometimes 30% is OK, sometimes 70% is OK, right? Because we talked about this earlier, the children are way more resilient than we give them credit for."
Something is telling about the way Obama structured her complaint. She didn't say, "We should do more for mothers." She said, essentially, "You don't get to oppose abortion unless you also build the system I want." That's not an argument for supporting mothers. It's an argument for keeping abortion as the default solution when support systems are lacking.
This is a familiar move from the left. Package a policy demand inside a moral accusation, and suddenly, anyone who opposes abortion but doesn't support a specific government program is a hypocrite. The framing is designed to make the pro-life position contingent on endorsing a progressive welfare agenda. Accept the premise, and you've conceded that the right to life is negotiable based on what the state provides.
But conservatives have never argued that life's value depends on federal maternity leave mandates. The pro-life position is that a child in the womb is a human being. That's a moral claim, not a policy proposal with prerequisites. You don't need to build a perfect society before you can say killing the unborn is wrong.
The deeper irony is that the institutions most invested in supporting mothers, practically and directly, tend to be the ones the left either ignores or actively disdains. Churches, crisis pregnancy centers, faith-based charities, and local community organizations have been doing the unglamorous work of helping new mothers for decades. They provide diapers, formula, housing assistance, counseling, and childcare. They do it without a podcast.
When Obama says society doesn't create "an environment for all women to be able to heal, be focused, and then make the decisions at the right time about when they're ready to move on," she's talking about government. That's the only institution the left recognizes as legitimate when it comes to collective support. The family, the church, the neighborhood: these don't register.
And that blindspot is the actual mixed message. The progressive vision tells women that independence means freedom from all obligation, that children are resilient enough to handle a distracted parent, and that the solution to the difficulty of motherhood is more government intervention. It never tells women that motherhood is inherently valuable on its own terms, not as an obstacle to be managed, but as a vocation worth honoring.
Obama's advice to the listener was, on its surface, compassionate. Permitting yourself to operate at 40% or 30% in certain areas sounds forgiving. But listen to what it actually communicates: motherhood is one of several competing priorities, and the goal is to optimize your allocation across all of them.
This is the managerial language of modern feminism applied to the most intimate relationship a person can have. Your child isn't a deliverable. Motherhood isn't a vertical you're underperforming in. The reason new mothers feel torn isn't that society failed to give them enough leave. It's that something deep and true is telling them their baby needs them, and a culture that treats that instinct as a problem to be solved rather than a signal to be honored is the one sending mixed messages.
Obama acknowledged this instinct without realizing it. She noted that hormones tell a mother to feed and care for her child while "the societal structure is telling you to do something else." She's right. But the answer isn't to redesign the societal structure so mothers can more comfortably ignore the instinct. The answer is to ask why the structure demands that in the first place.
This wasn't a policy speech. It was a podcast segment. And Michelle Obama is free to say whatever she wants on her own show. But the framing matters because it captures a broader progressive argument that has become the default in media and elite culture: that pro-life conviction without progressive policy support is hypocrisy.
It isn't. It's a difference in philosophy about where support comes from and what human life is worth. Conservatives believe children deserve to be born. They also believe families, communities, and yes, sometimes government, should support mothers. But one belief doesn't require the other as a precondition. You don't earn the right to defend life by first passing a maternity leave bill.
Obama told her listeners that children won't stop loving their mothers for leaving the house to pursue a passion. That's probably true. But children also can't advocate for themselves in the womb. Someone has to speak for them without conditions attached.
Savannah Guthrie posted an emotional video to Instagram on Tuesday, Feb. 24, pleading for the public's help in finding her mother, Nancy Guthrie, who has been missing from her Arizona home since the early morning hours of Feb. 1. The Today anchor announced the family is offering a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to Nancy's recovery.
Nancy was last seen on Jan. 31. Nearly a month later, local, state, and federal authorities have flooded the area, combing rugged desert terrain for any sign of her or clues that could lead investigators to answers. So far, no resolution.
In the same video, Guthrie said the family is donating $500,000 to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Guthrie's message carried the weight of someone who has spent weeks oscillating between faith and grief. She acknowledged that her mother may never come home alive, but refused to abandon hope entirely.
"We also know that she may be lost; she may already be gone. She may already have gone home to the Lord that she loves, and is dancing in heaven with her mom and her dad and her beloved brother, Pierce, and with our daddy."
She followed that with a statement that captured the unbearable limbo of a family with no answers:
"And if this is what is to be, then we will all accept it. But we need to know where she is. We need her to come home."
That need, the need simply to know, is something that transcends celebrity. It is the most basic human demand in the face of loss: give us certainty, even if it's the worst kind. People reported.
Guthrie said she and her siblings still believe a miracle is possible, invoking her sister's phrase to describe where the family stands spiritually.
"We still believe. We still believe in a miracle. We still believe that she can come home. Hope against hope, as my sister says. We are blowing on the embers of hope."
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told NBC News on Feb. 20 that the investigation is "still growing." He acknowledged the frustration that comes with a case this prolonged.
"It's never fast enough for the sheriff. I want it like you: 'Come on, guys, let's go, let's go, let's find her.' But the reality is that I also know that sometimes things take time."
The sheriff's department previously asked residents in Nancy's neighborhood to submit surveillance footage dating back to Jan. 1. Authorities zeroed in on two specific time windows:
They specifically requested a video showing cars, traffic, pedestrians, or anything unusual.
There has been speculation about a masked man captured on doorbell camera footage near Nancy's home. When asked on Feb. 23 whether that individual had also been caught on camera at the home on a prior occasion, Nanos was direct.
"There is no evidence to support that. It is speculative at best and remains part of an ongoing investigation."
That answer tells us the investigation remains open and active, but offers little comfort to a family running out of days to hope.
What elevates Guthrie's appeal beyond a personal tragedy is her willingness to point beyond her own family's pain. She acknowledged the countless Americans who live in the same terrible uncertainty, families without national platforms or million-dollar rewards.
"We also know that we are not alone in our loss. We know there are millions of families that have suffered with this kind of uncertainty."
"We are hoping that the attention that has been given to our mom and our family will extend to all the families like ours who are in need and need prayers and need support."
That is a statement worth taking seriously. The disappearance of a television anchor's mother commands resources and coverage that most missing persons cases never receive. The $500,000 donation to NCMEC suggests Guthrie understands this disparity and is trying to use her visibility to widen the circle of attention.
Every community in America has families living in this limbo. Many of them will never trend on social media. Their cases will never warrant a press conference from a county sheriff. That is a failure worth reckoning with, and it does not diminish what the Guthrie family is enduring to say so.
Guthrie closed her video with the kind of plea that needs no editorial commentary:
"Help us bring our beloved mom home so that we can either celebrate a glorious, miraculous homecoming or celebrate the beautiful, brave, courageous and noble life that she has lived."
Nearly a month of searching. Federal, state, and local agencies are deployed across the Arizona desert. A family offering everything it has for a single piece of information. And still, silence from the terrain that swallowed Nancy Guthrie.
The embers are fading. But they haven't gone out.
CBS Evening News host Tony Dokoupil praised President Trump's record-breaking State of the Union address as "extraordinary" and "historic" Tuesday night, while over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow offered a starkly different verdict: the speech was "wound-up and weird" and amounted to "violence porn."
The split-screen reactions, delivered within minutes of Trump concluding the longest State of the Union in American history, offered a near-perfect snapshot of where the media stands heading into the midterms. One network's anchor engaged with the substance. The other couldn't get past her own revulsion long enough to try.
Trump spoke for a record-breaking 1 hour and 47 minutes, covering the economy, immigration, gender ideology, and voter identification. Dokoupil, 45, who was elevated to the CBS Evening News anchor desk in January 2026, described what he watched this way:
"It was an extraordinary speech - the longest to a joint session in history, the longest State of the Union in history... The first part of the speech, all about the economy, an issue we know a lot of Americans want to hear about."
As reported by the Daily Mail, he characterized the performance as "vintage Trump: combative, populist. Historic for other reasons, as well." Dokoupil also identified what he called "the heart of the speech," pointing to the president's remarks on immigration, gender, and voter identification as the substance that mattered most.
Dokoupil noted that Trump ad-libbed one of the night's sharpest lines, one that wasn't in the prepared script: "The first duty of elected officials is to protect Americans, not illegal aliens." He also observed that Trump "seemed at times to be goading Democrats into reacting, and at times they took that bait."
That's a straightforward observation. It's also the kind of analysis that would have been unremarkable at CBS five years ago. Today it qualifies as countercultural.
Rachel Maddow, 52, took a different approach. She skipped past the economic portion of the address almost entirely, dismissing it in a single breath:
"The president didn't seem very invested in the lies that he was telling about the economy, but he did list a whole bunch of them right off the bat."
No rebuttal. No specifics. Just "lies" as a category and a wave of the hand. The real offense, in Maddow's telling, was that Trump devoted large portions of the speech to anecdotes about Americans killed by illegal immigrants. She described it as gratuitous:
"He talked about people being covered in blood, gushing blood, blood pouring out of things… people being on the edge of death."
She went further, accusing Trump of going into "graphic detail on several different people's injuries" and offering "as much sort of gory detail as he could, talking about very bloody scenes." Her final characterization: the president engaged in "sort of violently pornographic riffing."
Think about what that framing actually does. A president stands before Congress and tells the stories of Americans whose lives were destroyed by people who should never have been in the country. He names the cost of policy failure in human terms. And the progressive response is to complain that it was too vivid.
The families of those victims might use a different word than "pornographic." They might call it recognition.
Maddow predicted the main takeaway from the speech would be "his pace and his freneticism." That tells you everything about how she processed the evening. Not the policy. Not the arguments. The tempo.
CBS Chief Washington Analyst Robert Costa offered a more grounded assessment, calling the speech "entirely who President Trump is":
"Totally defiant, blunt force politically on all of these issues, not so much making a speech but a presentation, and a recharacterization of the political reality. Trying to put it in his fingerprints ahead of the midterms."
Costa may not have been cheerleading, but he was doing his job: explaining what the speech accomplished politically. That's a low bar, and yet it towers above dismissing the whole thing as a blood-soaked fever dream.
The divide here isn't really between CBS and MSNBC. It's between a media willing to grapple with what a president actually said and a media that pre-decided its reaction before Trump reached the podium. Maddow didn't engage with the immigration argument. She didn't contest the specific cases Trump raised. She objected to the fact that he raised them at all.
Dokoupil's willingness to call the speech "extraordinary" without immediately qualifying it into meaninglessness is worth noting in context. He was promoted from CBS Mornings earlier this year by new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, 41, the founder of the right-leaning Free Press, who was appointed by Paramount CEO David Ellison under the pretense of being a disruptor after the company's merger with Skydance.
Weiss has had a turbulent tenure since taking over in October. She held a highly publicized town hall with Erika Kirk in December. She hired Matt Gutman, a longtime former ABC journalist who previously worked at the Jerusalem Post, as the network's chief reporter. She also pulled a 60 Minutes segment that was set to examine conditions at CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where the Trump administration has been sending illegal immigrants.
The CECOT decision drew predictable outrage from the usual corners, but it signaled something important: editorial choices at CBS are no longer running on autopilot. Whether Weiss can sustain that shift through a full midterm cycle is an open question, but Dokoupil's Tuesday night performance suggests she's at least putting anchors in front of the camera who are willing to describe reality without flinching.
There's a pattern worth naming. Every time a conservative leader forces the public to confront the human consequences of illegal immigration, the progressive media apparatus reaches for the same move: don't argue the facts, argue the tone. Call it fearmongering. Call it exploitation. Call it pornographic. Anything to avoid the underlying question: were these people killed, and could their deaths have been prevented by enforcing the law?
Maddow never answered that. She never had to, because her audience doesn't require it. They tuned in to be told the speech was bad, and she delivered.
Dokoupil's audience got something different. They got an anchor who acknowledged the speech was long, noted its political strategy, identified its emotional core, and let viewers decide for themselves. That used to be called journalism.
The longest State of the Union in history, and the most revealing reaction wasn't anything Trump said. It was what his critics refused to hear.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger stepped into the original historic House of Burgesses at the head of Colonial Williamsburg's Duke of Gloucester Street to deliver the official Democratic response to the State of the Union, and the irony of the setting was apparently lost on her.
The new governor, elected in November to succeed conservative Gov. Glenn Youngkin, used her national platform to hammer President Trump on tariffs and costs while her own blue legislature back in Richmond moves to enact or raise new taxes in multiple forms. She asked Americans whether the president is "working to make life more affordable" for their families. Virginians watching at home might have the same question for her.
Spanberger structured her response around a simple frame: costs. She blamed Trump's tariff policies for increasing prices on "housing, healthcare, energy, and childcare," warning they would "make your life more expensive," Fox News reported.
Then she offered herself as the contrast:
"But here in Virginia, I am working with our state legislature to lower costs and make the Commonwealth more affordable."
She went further, claiming the effort extends beyond the Old Dominion:
"And it's not just me. Democrats across the country are laser-focused on affordability — in our nation's capital and in state capitals and communities across America."
Laser-focused. On affordability. While supporting the legislative Democrat majority's slew of taxes, from new sales taxes to a levy on fantasy football operators. Virginia Democrats are pushing scores of new taxes, and their governor chose this moment to lecture the country about costs.
That is the kind of contradiction that doesn't need a punchline. It is the punchline.
Spanberger also slammed Trump over his mass deportation operations, a line that tracks perfectly with the Democrat playbook of treating immigration enforcement as something to apologize for rather than execute. The new governor has already drawn criticism from Republicans on immigration policy, with former RNC chairman Reince Priebus among those publicly criticizing her approach.
This is the familiar two-step: oppose enforcement, then blame the consequences of non-enforcement on someone else. Spanberger recounted her 2025 election season traveling around Virginia, apparently hearing concerns about costs and safety, then delivered a response that offered no serious answer on either front beyond blaming the sitting president.
The speech leaned heavily on setting and symbolism. Spanberger invoked the House of Burgesses, where in 1705 the colony first gathered with what she called the "extraordinary task of governing themselves." She referenced George Washington's Farewell Address, quoting his warning about "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men" rising to power.
The implication was not subtle.
She also borrowed Washington's language about uniting in "a common cause," pivoting to a call for collective action:
"That is our charge once more. And that is what we are seeing across the country. It is deeply American and patriotic to do so, and it is how we ensure that the State of our Union remains strong, not just this year but for the next 250 years as well."
Meanwhile, inside the actual Capitol, House Speaker Mike Johnson wielded George Washington's gavel for the first time in State of the Union history. One leader used Washington as a rhetorical device. The other brought his gavel into the room. Draw your own conclusions about who treated the moment with more substance.
In a detail that will likely live online longer than any policy point she attempted, Spanberger appeared to briefly lose her place on the teleprompter during the address. It was a small stumble on a big stage, and while it shouldn't overshadow policy substance, it doesn't inspire confidence from a governor trying to introduce herself as the face of Democratic opposition.
Strip the Colonial Williamsburg backdrop, the Washington quotes, and the rhetorical flourishes, and the speech reduces to a familiar formula: Trump is making things expensive, Democrats care about your wallet, trust us.
The problem is the receipts. Virginia's Democrat legislature isn't cutting costs. It's piling on new taxes. Spanberger isn't vetoing them. She isn't fighting them. She's "working with" the same lawmakers who are reaching deeper into Virginians' pockets while she stands at a national podium and talks about affordability.
Spanberger closed with a lofty appeal:
"Because 'We the people' have the power to make change, the power to stand up for what is right, and the power to demand more of our nation."
Virginians might start by demanding more of their governor. Specifically, they might demand that the woman lecturing the country about affordability explain why her own state government is making their lives more expensive.
The House of Burgesses was built for self-governance. What it got Tuesday night was a campaign speech dressed in colonial linen.
Robert Scrivner stood before cameras this week and did something no child should ever have to do: publicly accuse his own father of abuse, then explain how the state of California helped that father walk free.
Speaking for the first time at a press conference held by State Senator Shannon Grove, Robert branded California's mental health diversion law a "flawed system." His father, former Kern County Supervisor Zack Scrivner, was charged last February with child abuse and possession of assault weapons. He avoided harsher charges of child sexual assault because he was under the influence of drugs at the time and instead entered a mental health diversion program.
Robert Scrivner did not mince words:
"My own father, who is an elected official in Kern County, assaulted my siblings and myself and was granted mental health diversion."
That single sentence carries more indictment of California's criminal justice priorities than a thousand policy papers ever could.
Under California law, mental health diversion allows eligible defendants with diagnosed mental health disorders to receive treatment instead of jail time, the New York Post reported. The program dates back to 2018, and critics have warned for years that it functions as a get-out-of-jail-free card for serious offenders.
The Scrivner case illustrates exactly how. Zack Scrivner was accused of climbing into bed with a pre-teen child in April 2024 and touching her inappropriately. Because he was allegedly under the influence of drugs during the incident, the charges were reduced. Instead of facing the full weight of what he allegedly did to children, he entered a diversion program.
Think about the logic at work here. A man is accused of sexually assaulting a child. Because he was high at the time, the system treats the crime as less serious. Being intoxicated during an alleged assault on a minor becomes a mitigating factor rather than an aggravating one. The drugs don't compound the horror; they dilute the accountability.
This is what California built.
Christina Scrivner, Zack's estranged wife, also spoke at the press conference in favor of the proposed legislation. Her words captured the particular cruelty of a system that asks victims to come forward, then fails them when they do:
"We tell our children to speak up, speak up for yourselves, tell the truth, be honest. My children were and they did."
And then she described what followed:
"Their answer to their plea, their cry for help, was a stark reality of a broken system under mental health diversion."
Christina called her children "courageous" and "honorable" for sharing the truth of their abuse. She described the trauma as "inexplicable." What she did not call it was surprising. For anyone who has watched California's progressive criminal justice experiments play out over the past decade, none of this is surprising. The pattern is familiar. Lenient frameworks designed with sympathetic hypotheticals in mind collide with grotesque real-world cases, and the system shrugs.
Grove used the press conference to announce Senate Bill 1373, which would set limits on which crimes qualify for mental health diversion. She was direct about its purpose:
"My bill will ensure that those who commit violent crimes, such as attempted murder of a child, assault resulting in death and domestic violence, are no longer eligible for a mental health diversion program."
The bill represents a straightforward correction. Violent crimes against children, attempted murder, and domestic violence should never have been eligible for diversion in the first place. That they were tells you everything about the philosophy that produced the 2018 law: the offender's therapeutic journey matters more than the victim's safety.
Assemblymember Dr. Jasmeet Bains, who specializes in family and addiction medicine, added her voice to the effort. Her framing was notably blunt for a California Democrat:
"It was designed to help people get treatment and rehabilitation in appropriate cases, not to provide an escape hatch to sexually assault children."
Bains called it the "Epstein loophole," a term that has attached itself to this provision because of how neatly it captures the dynamic: powerful people exploiting therapeutic language to escape consequences for predatory behavior.
California has spent the better part of a decade reimagining criminal justice around the idea that incarceration is the problem rather than the response to a problem. Proposition 47 downgraded theft. Proposition 57 eased early release for "nonviolent" offenders through classifications that strained the meaning of the word. Zero-bail policies turned arrest into a revolving door. Mental health diversion was supposed to be the humane, evidence-based alternative to a system the left insisted was irredeemably punitive.
But humane for whom? Not for Robert Scrivner. Not for his siblings. Not for the pre-teen child Zack Scrivner allegedly climbed into bed with.
Every one of these reforms shares the same structural defect. They center the accused. They treat the system's response to crime as the injustice worth fixing, rather than the crime itself. And when the inevitable horror story emerges, the architects of these policies express shock that anyone would use a loophole as a loophole.
The fact that it took a former county supervisor's own son going public to generate enough pressure for a legislative fix tells you how entrenched these frameworks are. How many cases without a press conference never get corrected at all?
Senate Bill 1373 faces the gauntlet of California's legislature, where criminal justice reform has historically meant making enforcement softer, not harder. Whether Grove can build enough coalition support to carve out these exclusions remains an open question. Bains's involvement as a physician and assemblymember lends bipartisan credibility, but Sacramento has killed commonsense public safety measures before.
The Scrivner family did what the system told them to do. The children spoke up. The mother believed them. They told the truth. And California's answer was to send the man accused of abusing them to a treatment program instead of a cell.
Robert Scrivner had to stand at a podium and say his father's name out loud to change that. No child should carry that weight. But in California, the state made sure someone had to.