Spencer Pratt — yes, that Spencer Pratt — filed to run for mayor of Los Angeles, and his opening salvo landed squarely on Karen Bass and the city's fire leadership. The former star of The Hills is demanding the firing of multiple L.A. Fire Department officials, including the fire chief and fire battalion chief, over what he describes as a deliberate cover-up of the catastrophic wildfire response in January 2025.
In a video captured by a FOXLA reporter, Pratt laid out his case plainly:
"We're going to find out what failures the mayor and LAFD and the state parks and everyone involved to those 12 people burning alive, 7,000 structures [destroyed]. There's no looking forward until we get the answers and the people that are responsible are fired. That includes the fire chief, the fire battalion chief, that includes the mayor, it includes anybody that had anything to do with [the failed fire response]."
The celebrity-turned-candidate isn't running on vibes. He's running on fury — and on a story that should enrage every Angeleno who watched their city burn.
At the center of Pratt's campaign launch is an allegation that Mayor Bass ordered the watering down of the LAFD's after-action report on the January 2025 wildfires. As Breitbart News reported in December, the report allegedly went through several revisions designed to delete negative aspects of the city's fire response — a response that left more than two dozen people dead and thousands of structures in ashes.
Think about what that means. A city government presided over one of the worst urban fire disasters in modern memory, and instead of conducting an honest accounting of what went wrong, allegedly took a red pen to the findings. Not to fix the failures. To hide them.
Mayor Bass has offered no public response to these allegations within the reporting. Neither has the LAFD. The silence from City Hall is doing a lot of work here — and none of it is reassuring.
Los Angeles has become a masterclass in how one-party governance handles failure: spend lavishly, deliver nothing, and when the bill comes due, edit the receipt.
Pratt also aimed to reduce the city's homelessness spending, promising to audit Los Angeles's budget. The city has poured billions of tax dollars into homelessness programs, and every year the problem metastasizes. The encampments grow. The streets deteriorate. The money vanishes into a bureaucracy that measures success by inputs — dollars spent, programs launched — rather than outcomes. Anyone who has walked through downtown L.A. in the last five years can see where those billions went. Which is to say, nowhere visible.
This is the environment Pratt is stepping into. A city where the political class spends without accountability, fails without consequence, and allegedly sanitizes the evidence when someone tries to document what happened.
The instinct is to dismiss Pratt's candidacy. He's a reality TV personality, not a policy wonk. The political establishment will treat him as a punchline.
But that dismissal misses the point entirely. Pratt lost his home in the Palisades fire. He's not theorizing about government failure from a distance — he lived it. And in a city where the professional political class has produced nothing but decline, the question voters should ask isn't whether Pratt has governing experience. It's whether the people with governing experience have actually governed.
Karen Bass came into office with every institutional advantage. She had the party infrastructure, the media goodwill, and the full backing of Sacramento. And when the fires came, the hydrants ran dry, the response faltered, and more than two dozen people died. The after-action report that was supposed to ensure it never happened again was allegedly gutted on her orders.
Pratt may or may not be the right person to run Los Angeles. But he's asking the right questions — questions the incumbent has refused to answer.
The mayoral race just acquired a candidate with name recognition, a personal connection to the disaster, and zero loyalty to the political machinery that produced it. Pratt has promised a full audit of city spending and a relentless pursuit of answers on the fire response. Whether he can build a campaign infrastructure to match the rhetoric remains to be seen.
But here's what's already clear: the political establishment in Los Angeles would prefer this story disappear. They'd prefer the after-action report stay scrubbed. They'd prefer voters move on, accept the losses, and keep electing the same people who produced them.
More than two dozen people are dead. Thousands lost everything. And the city's own accounting of what went wrong was allegedly rewritten to protect the people responsible.
Someone was going to run on that. Now someone is.
Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party swept to a supermajority in Sunday's snap election, handing Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi — the country's first female prime minister — a commanding mandate just months after she took office. The LDP captured 316 of 465 seats in the House of Representatives, blowing well past the 233 needed for a simple majority.
Takaichi had staked everything on the gamble, threatening to resign if the LDP lost its majority. She didn't just keep it. She crushed the threshold by 83 seats.
The result lands as a major validation — not only of Takaichi's leadership, but of the broader alliance she has cultivated with President Trump, who endorsed her ahead of the vote.
Takaichi's political DNA traces directly to the late Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister during Trump's first term and one of the few world leaders who built a genuine personal friendship with the American president, according to the Washington Examiner. Abe was assassinated in 2022, but the strategic vision he championed — a stronger, more assertive Japan tightly aligned with the United States — didn't die with him.
Takaichi has picked up that mantle with deliberate symbolism. Last fall, she joined Trump aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier in Japan. In October, she gifted him Abe's golf putter — a gesture that carried weight far beyond protocol. It signaled continuity: the alliance Abe built would not only survive but deepen.
Her post-election message to Trump, posted on X, made the point explicit:
"I am sincerely grateful to President Donald J. Trump for his warm words. Our Alliance and friendship with the United States of America are built on deep trust and close, strong cooperation. The potential of our Alliance is LIMITLESS. Let us work together to ensure that our Alliance continues to bring peace and prosperity to our two nations — and beyond."
That's not diplomatic boilerplate. That's a leader who understands that the U.S.-Japan relationship is the load-bearing wall of Pacific security — and who wants Washington to know she's building, not renovating.
Takaichi's policy agenda reads like a wish list for anyone who has spent the last decade begging allied nations to carry their own weight. She has committed to ramping up defense spending and has pursued investment commitments worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States. Her stated framework centers on what she calls a "responsible and proactive fiscal policy" designed to "ensure necessary investments."
This matters. For years, the conservative critique of allied nations — particularly in NATO, but also in the Pacific — has been straightforward: they free-ride on American military power while underinvesting in their own defense and offering little in return. Japan under Takaichi is moving in the opposite direction. More defense spending. Massive capital is flowing into the American economy. A tighter bilateral alliance built on mutual commitment rather than one-sided obligation.
Compare that posture to the Europeans who still treat every request for burden-sharing as an affront. Takaichi doesn't need to be dragged to the table. She showed up early and brought investment commitments.
The scale of this victory matters beyond the headline number. With 316 seats in a 465-seat chamber, the LDP holds more than a two-thirds supermajority. That is not a governing coalition held together by favors and fragile agreements. It is a mandate that gives Takaichi the political capital to move aggressively on defense, fiscal policy, and the U.S. alliance without being hamstrung by coalition partners or legislative gridlock.
She bet her premiership on a snap election months into the job — and the Japanese electorate answered with the clearest possible signal of confidence.
For an Indo-Pacific region watching China's military buildup, North Korea's provocations, and the broader contest for influence across Asia, a politically secure, pro-alliance Japanese prime minister is not a small thing. It is a strategic asset.
Trump's endorsement of Takaichi ahead of the election drew the usual skepticism from the usual corners. Foreign endorsements are supposed to be irrelevant at best, counterproductive at worst — or so the conventional wisdom holds.
Takaichi won a supermajority.
The endorsement reflected something real: a relationship between two leaders whose strategic interests are aligned and whose personal rapport is built on the foundation Abe laid years ago. Trump recognized a leader who was already doing the things he has demanded of allies — investing in defense, investing in America, and strengthening the bilateral relationship without preconditions or lectures.
In a world where allied leaders often say the right things in summits and then slow-walk their commitments the moment the cameras turn off, Takaichi is delivering. Sunday's result ensures she'll have the power to keep delivering for years to come.
The strongest alliance in the Pacific just got stronger — and the voters who made it possible weren't confused about what they were choosing.
A federal judge in Manhattan handed down a temporary ruling Friday unfreezing funds the Trump administration had withheld from the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel project connecting New York and New Jersey — a decision that came just hours after both states warned construction would grind to a halt without the money.
U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas found that New York and New Jersey were likely to succeed on their claims that the administration's directive freezing the funds was arbitrary and violated legal procedures for making policy changes. The ruling covers $205 million in reimbursements withheld since October 1.
The decision injects new uncertainty into a dispute that has become a magnet for Democratic grandstanding — and raises real questions about how infrastructure dollars get tangled in politics regardless of which party is doing the tangling.
The Gateway Project is meant to replace the existing Hudson Tunnel, a piece of infrastructure that carries more than 200,000 travelers and 425 trains daily. Hurricane Sandy heavily damaged the tunnel in 2012, and the project has limped through planning and funding phases ever since.
Under the Biden administration, the project was allocated roughly $15 billion in federal support — a staggering commitment that deserves its own scrutiny, according to CNBC. About $2 billion has been spent so far. The Gateway Development Commission warned that 1,000 construction workers would be idled by the suspension of funds.
The Department of Transportation said it froze the money pending a review of the project's compliance with new prohibitions against race- and sex-based considerations in contracting decisions. Gateway says it made changes and conducted a review to ensure compliance with those regulations. It has not heard back from the Department of Transportation.
That silence is worth noting. If the administration's stated reason for the freeze is a compliance review, then the review should actually proceed. Gateway claims it responded to the concerns. Whether that response was adequate is a legitimate question — but leaving it unanswered while funds sit frozen gives Democrats exactly the ammunition they want.
New York and New Jersey filed a lawsuit on January 3, describing the fund freeze as a "brazen act of political retribution" against their Democratic leaders. That's a characterization, not a fact — and the distinction matters. The states chose the most inflammatory framing available and built their legal case around it.
New Jersey Acting Attorney General Jennifer Davenport wasted no time after the ruling:
"The Trump Administration must drop this campaign of political retribution immediately and must allow work on this vital infrastructure project to continue."
Senator Cory Booker held a press conference near the project site on Friday and offered his own theory about why funds were withheld — Trump "seems to want to put his name on everything."
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand went further:
"These naming rights aren't tradable as part of any negotiations, and neither is the dignity of New Yorkers ... The president continues to put his own narcissism over the good-paying union jobs this project provides and the extraordinary economic impact the Gateway tunnel will bring."
This is the part where it helps to separate what's verified from what's speculated. Trump has reportedly demanded that Washington Dulles Airport and New York's Penn Station be renamed for him in exchange for unfreezing the funds. Trump told reporters Friday he had not proposed renaming either one — and said it was actually Schumer who proposed renaming Penn Station, with "numerous people" suggesting the Dulles name change. Schumer called that claim an "absolute lie" on social media. A source familiar with the matter told Reuters that Schumer had told the White House he didn't even have the power to rename either facility.
The he-said-he-said is unresolved. What is clear: Democrats are using the ambiguity to turn an infrastructure funding dispute into a personality referendum. That's a play they know well.
Lost in the noise is a straightforward policy question: Should $15 billion in federal money flow to a project in two deep-blue states with minimal accountability review?
The Biden administration committed an extraordinary sum to this project. That commitment was made during a period of historic federal spending, much of it rushed through with minimal oversight. A compliance review — the stated reason for the freeze — is not inherently unreasonable. Federal dollars attached to DEI-related contracting requirements deserve examination, particularly when the current administration has made eliminating such requirements a policy priority.
The problem is execution. If the Department of Transportation initiates a compliance review and then goes silent after the project authority responds, the freeze starts to look less like due diligence and more like bureaucratic limbo. That's the kind of thing that loses in court, as it did Friday.
Judge Vargas's ruling is temporary, not final. But the trajectory matters. Agencies that freeze funds need to articulate clear standards, process responses in good faith, and move decisively. Ambiguity is a gift to your opponents.
Whether or not anyone proposed renaming Penn Station or Dulles, the entire naming subplot has become a distraction that Democrats are only too happy to exploit. Every minute spent debating whose name goes on a building is a minute not spent on the substantive questions:
These are the questions that serve taxpayers. The naming debate serves cable news.
The ruling is temporary, meaning the legal battle is far from over. But the practical effect is immediate — funds flow again, and construction can resume. The administration did not comment on the decision.
For conservatives, the Gateway saga is a useful case study in how not to lose a winnable fight. The underlying instinct — reviewing massive federal expenditures for compliance with current law — is sound. The execution created a vacuum that Democrats filled with press conferences, lawsuits, and accusations of retribution. A federal judge agreed, at least provisionally.
Two hundred thousand daily commuters depend on infrastructure that was damaged over a decade ago. That's a real problem with real consequences for working people. The strongest conservative position isn't to deny the need — it's to demand that the money is spent lawfully, efficiently, and without the DEI strings that the previous administration attached to seemingly everything it touched.
That argument wins on the merits. It just has to actually be made.
Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada announced Friday that he will not seek reelection, bringing the total number of House Republicans stepping away from Congress this year to 30. Twenty-one Democrats have also opted not to run again, pushing the chamber toward what could be historically significant turnover heading into the midterms.
Amodei, a member of the House Appropriations Committee and the House Natural Resources Committee, has served in the House since 2011. He framed his departure as a matter of timing, not frustration.
"After 15 years of service, I believe it is the right time for Nevada and myself to pass the torch."
The announcement lands at a moment when more than 10% of House incumbents plan to leave — the highest percentage at this point in the calendar since at least the Obama administration, according to an Associated Press analysis of retirements going back to 2013.
Amodei's language was classically valedictory, Mediaite reported. He spoke of listening to Nevadans, fighting for values, and passing the torch. Nothing in his statement suggests internal conflict or disillusionment.
"Serving the people of Nevada has been the honor of my lifetime. Nobody is prouder of our Nevada Congressional District than me. Thank you for the honor. Every achievement worth doing began with listening to Nevadans and fighting for our values."
President Trump endorsed Amodei for reelection back in November on Truth Social:
"Mark Amodei has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election — HE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!"
Amodei thanked him publicly on X. Whatever prompted his change of heart came after that exchange — and Amodei isn't saying what it was.
The number 30 is large enough to demand attention but too blunt an instrument to tell you much on its own. Retirements happen for dozens of reasons — age, redistricting risk, the pull of private life, frustration with governing in a razor-thin majority where every vote is a hostage negotiation. Lumping them all under one narrative is lazy.
Some departures this cycle have been more conspicuous than others. Marjorie Taylor Greene left her seat this year amid reported tensions with the party. That's a different story than a 15-year veteran from Nevada deciding the work is done.
What the number does reveal is this: the GOP's House majority, already slim, faces a serious structural challenge in the midterms. Every open seat is a seat without the incumbency advantage. Every retirement creates a primary, and every primary creates a window for Democrats to compete in districts they otherwise couldn't touch. Republicans don't have the margin to treat 30 open seats as routine housekeeping.
It's who replaces them.
Open-seat primaries are where the direction of the party actually gets decided — not in cable news debates about the soul of conservatism, but in district-level races where voters pick the person who'll cast votes on spending, immigration, and oversight for the next two years. If the GOP recruits strong candidates who can hold these seats and govern effectively, the retirements are a natural generational shift. If they don't, the retirements become a gift to Democrats who need to flip only a handful of seats to reclaim the gavel.
The conservative project in the House — DOGE-aligned spending reform, border enforcement, accountability for federal agencies — doesn't survive a Democratic majority. Every one of these 30 seats is a line that has to hold.
Twenty-one Democratic retirements deserve more attention than they're getting. The media's fixation on Republican departures treats them as evidence of a crisis while Democratic retirements barely register as news. The imbalance in coverage is revealing — not because 30 isn't a larger number than 21, but because the framing is always "Republican party in chaos" and never "Democrats fleeing a weak brand."
Both parties are bleeding incumbents. Only one party's bleeding gets treated as a symptom of dysfunction.
Amodei says he'll finish his term. Nevada's second congressional district will have an open primary. The state's political landscape — competitive but right-leaning at the congressional level — means this seat is holdable for Republicans, but not automatically.
The broader midterm picture is the one that matters. Thirty retirements don't doom a majority, but they demand a seriousness about candidate recruitment and resource allocation that leaves no room for complacency. The majority was built seat by seat. It can disappear the same way.
Dee Snider, the 70-year-old frontman who became the voice and face of Twisted Sister for half a century, has resigned from the band. The remaining dates on Twisted Sister's 50th anniversary concert tour are canceled.
The announcement came via a statement on the band's website this week, and it paints a picture that fans never saw coming — though Snider, apparently, has been fighting through it for years.
Snider's representative laid it out plainly:
"A lifetime of legendarily aggressive performing has taken its toll on Dee Snider's body and soul. Unbeknownst to the public (until now) Snider (70) suffers from degenerative arthritis and has had several surgeries over the years just to keep going, able to only perform a few songs at a time in pain."
Several surgeries. Pain through every set. And nobody knew.
But it's not just the joints. The statement revealed that Snider recently learned his heart has also paid the price for decades of full-throttle performing:
"Adding insult to injury, Dee has recently found out the level of intensity he has dedicated to his life's work has taken its toll on his heart as well. He can no longer push the boundaries of rock 'n' roll fury like he has done for decades."
Degenerative arthritis and a compromised heart — either one alone could end a career. Together, they ended Snider's on his own terms, as Breitbart reports.
What stands out here isn't the diagnosis. It's the decision. Snider didn't fade. He didn't limp through a farewell tour on a stool with an acoustic guitar and a teleprompter. He chose the door.
"I don't know of any other way to rock. The idea of slowing down is unacceptable to me. I'd rather walk away than be a shadow of my former self."
There's something deeply respectable about a man who refuses to dilute what he built. In a culture that rewards the endless grift — the reunion cash grab, the nostalgia circuit, the half-speed legacy act — Snider did the harder thing. He stopped.
His representative closed with a borrowed line that landed perfectly:
"In the immortal words of Dirty Harry, 'A man's got to know his limitations.' Sadly, Dee Snider now knows his."
Not everyone saw this coming. Bandmates Jay Jay French and Eddie Ojeda issued their own statement, calling Snider's exit "sudden and unexpected." They said the fate of Twisted Sister will be determined in the coming weeks.
That's a telling detail. Whatever conversations led to Snider's decision, they apparently didn't include the rest of the band until the end. Whether that reflects the severity of his condition, his personality, or both, the result is the same — Twisted Sister's 50th anniversary celebration is over before it finishes.
There's a cultural thread worth pulling here. Snider performed through degenerative arthritis for years. Multiple surgeries. Pain every night. He told no one. He didn't post about it. He didn't launch a GoFundMe or turn his condition into a brand. He just kept showing up until his body wouldn't let him anymore.
That ethos — quiet endurance, work as identity, refusal to be pitied — is increasingly countercultural. We live in an era that rewards vulnerability as performance, where broadcasting your suffering is a form of social currency. Snider did the opposite. He hid the suffering and delivered the work.
You don't have to be a Twisted Sister fan to recognize what that costs a man, or to respect the kind of stubbornness it requires.
At 70, after five decades of performing at an intensity that wrecked his body and strained his heart, Dee Snider refused to give anyone a lesser version of himself. He gave them nothing instead — and somehow, that's the most rock 'n' roll exit imaginable.
Vice President JD Vance sat down for an exclusive interview in his office at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and shared a detail that most parents will find either deeply relatable or slightly nerve-wracking: he and Second Lady Usha Vance still don't have a name picked out for their baby boy, expected later this year. And they're in no rush.
It's a tradition for the couple, apparently. All three of their children — Ewan, 8; Vivek, 6; and Mirabel, 4 — arrived nameless and left the hospital with one.
"We've talked about a few names. We're working on it, but, you know, with all three of our kids, we actually didn't settle on their names until after they were born, which is, I think, pretty unusual."
Unusual is one word for it. In an era of gender-reveal pyrotechnics and nursery themes announced before the second trimester, the Vances are doing something almost countercultural: waiting to meet their child before deciding what to call him.
The couple announced in January that they were expecting a boy, their fourth child. Usha Vance, 40, carries a quiet distinction with the pregnancy: she is the first vice president's wife to be expecting since Ellen Colfax gave birth in April 1870, during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. That's over 150 years between pregnancies in the Naval Observatory household — a gap that says something about the age at which most vice presidents serve, as Daily Mail reports.
The Vances married in 2014 after meeting at Yale Law School, where they attended the same classes. Friends and even a former law school professor reportedly noted that Vance was visibly "lovesick" around Usha. He has described his feelings during their dating phase as "overwhelming." Their eldest son arrived in 2017, and the family has grown steadily since.
"Most people choose a name. Well, before the kid is born. I think Usha and I have never just found a name where it's like, 'Alright, this is what we want to name our kid.' And so we always wait to meet them and settle on the names from there."
Something is appealing about that. A willingness to let the child be a person before becoming a label.
This isn't a policy article. There's no bill to dissect, no agency to scrutinize. But it's worth pausing on what it means to have a young, growing family in the vice president's residence — something that hasn't happened in modern memory.
Vance grew up in working-class Ohio. Usha's parents are Indian immigrants. They built a life together that now includes three kids, a fourth on the way, and the second-highest office in the country. Before his time as vice president, Vance previously split his time between Washington and the family's home in Cincinnati during his tenure as a Republican senator. The family knows what it means to balance public life with raising children.
In a political culture that treats family values as a slogan, the Vances are living them — visibly, without performance. No elaborate announcement campaign for the baby name. No focus-grouped reveal. Just two parents who want to look at their son before they decide what to call him.
Baby number four arrives later this year. The name arrives when it's ready.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard torched Sen. Mark Warner on Saturday, posting a detailed rebuttal on X after the Virginia Democrat accused her of burying a classified whistleblower complaint filed against her last May. Gabbard didn't mince words—she called Warner a liar and laid out a timeline she says exonerates her office entirely.
The complaint, filed by an unnamed U.S. intelligence official eight months ago, alleges wrongdoing on the part of Gabbard. Neither the contents nor the specific allegations have been revealed. What has been revealed is a political fight over process—specifically, how long the complaint sat before reaching Congress and who bears responsibility for the delay.
Warner says the law required Congress to receive the complaint within 21 days. Gabbard says that the requirement doesn't apply here. One of them is banking on the public not reading the fine print.
Gabbard's Saturday post was lengthy, specific, and combative. She went after Warner by name and accused him of coordinating with the media to mislead the public.
"Senator Mark Warner and his friends in the Propaganda Media have repeatedly lied to the American people that I or the ODNI 'hid' a whistleblower complaint in a safe for eight months. This is a blatant lie."
She then zeroed in on the custody chain—a detail Warner's framing conveniently omits. The complaint wasn't sitting in Gabbard's desk drawer. According to Gabbard, it was secured by Biden-era IC Inspector General Tamara Johnson, who held possession of it for months before her successor, Inspector General Chris Fox, continued the same protocols, as Fox News reports.
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, in possession or control of the Whistleblower's complaint, so I obviously could not have 'hidden' it in a safe. Biden-era IC Inspector General Tamara Johnson was in possession of and responsible for securing the complaint for months."
That's a significant point. If the complaint spent the bulk of its life in the hands of a Biden-appointed inspector general, the "Gabbard buried it" narrative requires some creative rewriting of the calendar.
Warner's accusation rests on a specific legal claim: that the statute required the complaint to reach Congress within 21 days of filing. Gabbard's rebuttal rests on an equally specific legal distinction—one that matters far more than Warner seems to want anyone to notice.
"The '21 day' requirement that Senator Warner alleges I did not comply with, only applies when a complaint is determined by the Inspector General to be both urgent AND apparently credible. That was NOT the case here."
An inspector general representative told the Wall Street Journal that it had determined some of the allegations in the complaint weren't credible, while it hasn't decided on others. If the complaint failed the credibility threshold, the 21-day clock never started. Warner's entire legal argument collapses into a talking point.
Gabbard said she was first notified by Chris Fox on December 4 that she needed to provide security guidance on how to share the complaint with Congress. She wrote that she took immediate action and that the IC Inspector General shared the complaint and referenced intelligence with relevant members of Congress last week. Fox hand-delivered it to the Gang of 8.
Gabbard offered Warner a choice:
Either he knows these facts and is intentionally lying to the American people, or he doesn't have a clue how these things work and is therefore not qualified to be in the U.S. Senate.
Both options are unflattering. Neither is implausible.
Warner, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NPR on Thursday that the situation was straightforward:
"The law is clear."
He added that the complaint was required to be sent to Congress within 21 days of its filing and said he believed it was an effort to bury the whistleblower complaint. His office told Fox News Digital that Gabbard's post was an "inaccurate attack that's entirely on brand for someone who has already and repeatedly proven she's unqualified to serve as DNI."
Notice what's missing from Warner's response: any engagement with Gabbard's actual legal argument. She cited the credibility threshold. He repeated, "The law is clear." She named the Biden-era inspector general who held the complaint for months. He said she buried it. The accusation doesn't change no matter how many times the defense is stated—which tells you everything about whether this is a legal dispute or a political operation.
Sen. Tom Cotton reviewed the complaint and the inspector general's handling of it, then posted his assessment on X Thursday:
"I agree with both inspectors general who have evaluated the matter: the complaint is not credible and the inspectors general and the DNI took the necessary steps to ensure the material has handled and transmitted appropriately in accordance with law."
Cotton didn't stop there. He framed the entire episode as part of a broader pattern—one that should sound familiar to anyone who watched the last decade of Washington politics.
"To be frank, it seems like just another effort by the president's critics in and out of government to undermine policies that they don't like; it's definitely not credible allegations of waste, fraud, or abuse."
Cotton's characterization carries weight here. He's a Republican on the intelligence committee who has actually read the classified material. Warner has read it too—but Warner's public statements focus on process timelines, not the substance of what's in the complaint. That asymmetry is telling.
One U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that disclosing the complaint's contents could cause "grave damage to national security." That's a detail worth sitting with. The same complaint Democrats are using to attack Gabbard is apparently so sensitive that its mere disclosure would be dangerous—and yet the political pressure campaign to publicize the dispute around it rolls forward without hesitation.
This is the contradiction at the heart of Warner's gambit. He wants maximum political damage from a complaint whose contents he can't discuss, filed by a person he can't name, about allegations an inspector general has partly deemed not credible. The weapon isn't the complaint itself. It's the accusation that it was hidden.
The whistleblower's lawyer accused Gabbard's office of slow-walking the complaint. Gabbard's office called the accusation "baseless and politically motivated."
Washington has a well-worn formula for this kind of fight. A classified complaint surfaces through media leaks. The substance remains hidden—conveniently immune to public scrutiny—while the process debate dominates headlines. The accused can't fully defend herself without compromising classified material. The accuser gets to imply the worst while risking nothing.
Gabbard, to her credit, engaged on the specifics. She named the Biden-era inspector general who held the complaint. She cited the legal standard Warner ignored. She provided a timeline with dates. Warner responded with a sentence fragment and a character attack.
The question isn't whether the complaint was in a safe for eight months. Everyone agrees it was. The question is whether Gabbard put it there—or whether a Biden appointee did, following standard protocol for classified material that didn't meet the credibility bar for expedited congressional review.
Warner knows the answer. He's counting on everyone else not to ask the question.
President Trump proclaimed on Friday, opening the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing, revoking prohibitions that had locked American fishermen out of nearly 5,000 square miles of Atlantic waters off the New England coast.
The White House branded the move part of Trump's "America First Fishing Policy" — a direct reversal of restrictions first imposed by Barack Obama in 2016 and reinstated by Joe Biden after Trump lifted them during his first term.
Three presidential terms. Three reversals. The 4,913-square-mile monument has become a regulatory ping-pong ball, and the people who actually make their living on the water have paid the price every time the pendulum swings toward Washington's environmental bureaucracy.
The White House made a straightforward argument: the fishing ban was never necessary in the first place.
"Prohibiting commercial fishing is not necessary for the proper care and management of the Monument, as many fish species are highly migratory, not unique to the area, and are already protected through existing laws, such as the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act."
That last point matters more than environmentalists want to admit. The Magnuson-Stevens Act is one of the most successful fishery management laws in the world. It already governs catch limits, habitat protections, and sustainability standards across U.S. waters. Layering a blanket commercial fishing ban on top of it wasn't science — it was symbolism, as Breitbart reports.
Obama established the monument in 2016, describing it as a way to protect vulnerable undersea corals and ecosystems. The timing — the final year of his presidency — was characteristic of an administration that loved using executive authority to lock up natural resources on its way out the door. Biden's restoration of the ban followed the same instinct: regulate first, ask fishermen later.
The White House statement framed the proclamation in broader economic terms:
"President Trump is committed to removing unnecessary restrictions on American fishermen in order to strengthen the U.S. economy, support coastal communities, and restore fairness to an industry disadvantaged by overregulation and unfair foreign competition."
John Williams, president and owner of the Atlantic Red Crab Company in New Bedford, Massachusetts, put it plainly to the Associated Press:
"We deserve to be rewarded, not penalized. We're demonstrating that we can fish sustainably and continue to harvest on a sustainable level in perpetuity."
Williams represents the kind of working Americans who rarely get a seat at the table when Washington decides how to manage the ocean. New England's fishing communities are not abstract stakeholders in a policy debate. They are families, businesses, and towns whose economic survival depends on access to the waters their industry has worked for generations.
The conservation establishment treats commercial fishermen as the problem. The fishermen themselves — the ones who depend on healthy fish stocks for their livelihoods — understand sustainability better than most of the advocates who lobby against them from offices hundreds of miles inland.
Gib Brogan, fisheries campaign director at the environmental group Oceana, offered the predictable counter to the Associated Press:
"The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument was created to provide strong protections for the wide range of marine life that live in these unique habitats."
Note what's missing from that statement: any specific claim that commercial fishing in the monument area has caused measurable ecological harm. Brogan describes why the monument was created. He doesn't demonstrate that the fishing ban achieved anything that the Magnuson-Stevens Act couldn't.
This is the pattern with environmental opposition to resource access. The argument is always about intention — what the policy was "created to" do — never about whether the restriction actually accomplished more than existing law. It's preservation by declaration, where drawing a line on a map substitutes for evidence-based management.
When the federal government closes off nearly 5,000 square miles of ocean to commercial fishing without demonstrating that existing regulations are inadequate, it isn't protecting the environment. It's choosing environmentalist aesthetics over the livelihoods of coastal Americans. The fish in that monument are highly migratory — they don't respect the boundaries Obama drew. But the fishermen who lost access to those waters felt every mile of them.
Trump announced the move on Truth Social, calling it:
"another BIG WIN for Maine, and all of New England."
He also aimed at the whiplash the industry has endured:
"In my first term, I reversed the prohibitions placed on commercial fishing, but Joe Biden, or whoever was using the AUTOPEN, foolishly reinstated them. Since Day One, I have taken historic action to end these disastrous policies."
The broader story here extends well beyond one marine monument. For decades, the progressive approach to conservation has followed a simple formula: restrict access, claim moral authority, and force the people who actually work the land and sea to prove they deserve permission to keep doing what they've always done.
It's a framework that treats American industry as guilty until proven innocent — and even then, the restrictions rarely come off. Obama imposed the ban. Trump lifted it. Biden reimposed it. The only constant was uncertainty for the fishermen caught in the middle.
The White House statement connected the proclamation to broader economic goals:
"By revoking the Obama-Biden restrictions, President Trump's proclamation supports New England's fishing communities, in turn fostering economic growth and job creation in coastal regions."
Coastal New England doesn't need another layer of federal protection from an industry that already operates under one of the world's most stringent fishery management frameworks. It needs Washington to stop treating working Americans as collateral damage in a conservation branding exercise.
The monument is open. The fishermen can fish. And the waters will be just fine — managed, as they already were, by the law.
One week after 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie vanished from her home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson, Arizona, the Pima County Sheriff's Office has not identified a single suspect, a single person of interest, or a single credible lead — at least none it's willing to share. What it has produced is a cascading series of investigative missteps that have left the Guthrie family desperate and the public questioning whether the department tasked with finding her is up to the job.
FBI agents returned to Nancy's home on Friday for what Fox News infrared footage confirmed was the third time agents combed the residence. It was the fourth time crime scene tape had been put up and torn down from the property. During this latest search, investigators seized a vehicle from the garage and recovered a camera from the roof — a camera that had seemingly been missed in every previous sweep.
Three searches of a house before you find the camera on the roof. Let that sit for a moment.
Sheriff Chris Nanos, who has led Pima County's law enforcement since 2020, has spent the week oscillating between overstatement and retreat. On Monday, he told NBC News that Nancy had been "abducted" and "taken from her bed." By Tuesday, he was walking it back, clarifying he'd been speaking figuratively and that no evidence supported the claim she was literally taken from her bed. His explanation landed somewhere between confession and complaint:
"Sometimes I'm speaking in generalities and ... and ... I'm not used to everybody hanging on to my words and then trying to hold me accountable for what I say. But I understand."
A county sheriff — the top law enforcement official in a jurisdiction investigating the disappearance of an elderly woman — is not used to people holding him accountable for what he says. During an active missing persons case. On national television, as Daily Mail reports.
By Thursday's press conference, Nanos had abandoned even the pretense of projecting competence. Asked about potential suspects and motives, he offered this:
"My guesswork is as good as yours."
The Tucson Sentinel published an op-ed on Wednesday that captured the local mood, describing Nanos's Tuesday press appearance as a performance whose answers could be summed up with:
"For the most part his answers were exasperated statements that could be summed up with a Scooby Doo 'Ruh ROH...'"
Nancy was reported missing shortly after noon on Sunday, February 1. Police arrived at her home by 12:15 PM. The department's fixed-wing Cessna aircraft — a basic tool for a search operation in a rural area — did not get airborne until around 5:00 PM. That's roughly five hours sitting on the tarmac while the trail went cold.
Matt Heinz, a member of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, told the Daily Mail what anyone with common sense already understood:
"The initial few hours of any kind of search like this are absolutely crucial."
The failure to deploy the aircraft wasn't just a scheduling hiccup. Sergeant Aaron Cross, president of the Pima County Sheriff's Deputies Association, said trained aviators who could have crewed the Cessna had been transferred out of the Air Operations Unit in recent weeks. Kathleen Winn, the Pima County Republican Party Chairwoman, echoed that claim. Sources close to the department blamed Nanos directly for the staffing shortage that left no qualified pilots available when it mattered most.
So the plane existed. The need was obvious. The personnel had been moved. And an 84-year-old woman's best chance at a rapid aerial search evaporated on the tarmac.
The crime scene tape going up and down four times at the same residence in less than a week isn't just embarrassing optics — it raises real questions about the chain of custody and evidentiary integrity. When reporters pressed Nanos on whether the repeated sealing and unsealing could create problems in a future prosecution, his response was dismissive:
"I'll let the court worry about it. We follow the rules of law."
That's a remarkable posture for the lead agency on the case. Any competent defense attorney watching this investigation unfold is already taking notes. If a suspect is ever identified — a significant "if" at this point — the prosecution will have to explain why the primary crime scene was treated like a revolving door. Nanos is letting the court worry about it. The court may have plenty to worry about.
The Guthrie family has released multiple videos pleading for Nancy's safe return. Whoever is responsible for her disappearance has made no contact with the family — no ransom demand, no communication of any kind. Nancy's daughter, Savannah Guthrie, has been identified among the family members grappling with an investigation that produces more questions than answers with each passing day.
The circumstances of Nancy's disappearance remain stubbornly unclear. She vanished during the early morning hours of February 1 from her home in the Catalina Foothills, a rural stretch of Tucson. Who reported her missing has not been disclosed. How she was taken — or whether she left under other circumstances — is unknown. Nanos himself admitted his earlier characterization of an abduction from her bed was figurative, not factual.
Nanos acknowledged Thursday that he should have called in the FBI and regional teams sooner. That admission, while welcome, doesn't explain why basic investigative instincts failed in real time. Deploying aerial search assets in a rural area isn't an advanced technique — it's standard procedure. Securing a crime scene once and keeping it secured isn't a luxury — it's the baseline. Finding a camera mounted on the roof of the subject's home shouldn't require three separate searches.
Sources within Nanos's own department told the Daily Mail he made critical mistakes in the first hours of the investigation. That's not political opposition talking. That's his own people.
This case has drawn overwhelming national media attention, and Nanos conceded that the scrutiny is entirely new to him. That much is obvious. The question isn't whether the sheriff is uncomfortable with cameras. The question is whether his department can find an 84-year-old woman who vanished from her home a week ago.
As of Saturday afternoon, the answer remained no.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem spent the past week doing something her critics apparently find intolerable: her job. While Congress fumbled through a partial government shutdown largely over how to fund her department, while Minneapolis smoldered from anti-ICE unrest, and while House Democrats staged "shadow hearings" to build an impeachment case against her, Noem was on a four-day swing through Mississippi, Texas, Arizona, and North Dakota — inspecting storm damage, meeting with Border Patrol agents, and standing along the border wall in Nogales to deliver a message that has clearly rattled the establishment.
The message: the border is more secure than it has been in decades, deportations are running at historic levels, and she isn't going anywhere.
In an interview with Fox News Digital conducted along the border wall in Nogales, Arizona, Noem laid out the deportation figures that define her tenure so far. The topline: over 3 million people removed from the country since the current administration took office. That breaks down into roughly 700,000 detained and physically removed, with over 2.3 million self-deporting — many of them incentivized by a program offering a $2,600 payment and a flight home.
"You know, you send the message around the world that America is now going to be enforcing its laws and making sure that if you're in this country illegally, that you should go home, and we've been incentivizing that through a $2,600 payment and a flight."
The self-deportation wave is the part of this story that rarely gets covered. Enforcement isn't just about agents and handcuffs — it's about credibility. When people around the world believe the United States will actually enforce its immigration laws, millions make the rational decision to leave voluntarily. That is deterrence working exactly as intended, as Fox News reports.
For context, DHS says more illegal immigrants crossed the southern border in a single average month under former President Biden than have crossed during Noem's entire tenure. That comparison alone should end most of the arguments against the current enforcement policy. It won't, of course, but it should.
The most politically charged element surrounding Noem right now isn't the border — it's Minneapolis. Operation Metro Surge, launched primarily in response to a fraud scheme involving members of the Somali community in Minnesota, has resulted in an estimated 4,000 criminal illegal immigrant apprehensions since the beginning of the year. Minneapolis, a self-declared sanctuary city where local authorities offer only minimal cooperation to federal immigration officers, became the epicenter of violent clashes between agitators and federal agents.
Two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were killed by federal immigration agents during the unrest. Noem labeled both "domestic terrorists," saying their deaths resulted from impeding law enforcement operations. The details of the specific incidents remain scarce, but the political fallout has been immediate. A Quinnipiac University survey taken January 29 through February 2 found that 58% of respondents believe Noem shouldn't have her job.
The poll number is real. The political calculation behind it is also real — and worth examining. Democrats and media outlets have spent weeks framing the Minneapolis operations as federal overreach. They have held shadow impeachment hearings. They have demanded Noem's resignation. What they have not done is grapple with the underlying question: what is a government supposed to do when a sanctuary city shelters thousands of criminal illegal immigrants and local leaders refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement?
The answer, apparently, is nothing. Enforce the law, and you're an authoritarian. Don't enforce the law and — well, Democrats never seem to face that second scenario, because they've built a political framework where non-enforcement is the default and any deviation from it is a scandal.
President Trump has repeatedly backed Noem in public — in January and again at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, where he addressed calls for her removal directly. A reporter asked whether he intended to relieve her of her position.
"Why would I do that? We have the strongest border in the history of our country."
He followed that with a claim about crime statistics:
"We have the best crime numbers we've ever had going back to the year 1900. That's 125 years. We have the lowest crime numbers."
Trump also placed border czar Tom Homan — a man who served as ICE director during Trump's first term and ran Enforcement and Removal Operations under Obama — in command of the Minneapolis situation. Noem credited Homan with bringing local Minneapolis leaders to the negotiating table.
Some unnamed reports have tried to manufacture a rivalry narrative between Homan and Noem. Nothing in the public record supports it. Both are executing a shared mandate, and the president has shown no hesitation in deploying them in complementary roles.
The partial government shutdown consumed Washington's attention during Noem's trip. Congress reached a House agreement to fund DHS through February 13 — a temporary patch, not a solution. Noem used the moment to remind Americans that ICE is only one piece of a sprawling department.
"Only 11% of the DHS budget is ICE. The rest of it is FEMA, TSA, that runs our security checkpoints at our airports."
"It is also the Coast Guard, which is absolutely critical to our maritime protection and also partnering with the Department of War."
She ticked through the rest — weapons of mass destruction programs, science and technology, national labs, cybersecurity — making the point that holding DHS funding hostage over disagreements about immigration enforcement puts far more at risk than ICE operations. ICE is one of 23 agencies under her authority. Shutting down the department to protest deportations means grounding Coast Guard operations, degrading airport security, and delaying disaster relief.
"We have a lot of responsibilities that we absolutely need to fund in order to do them properly. So, I'm hopeful that Congress will recognize that and pass this bill quickly."
It's a revealing dynamic. Democrats who claim to care about government services are willing to defund all of them to stop the one they don't like.
Between the policy fights and the political firestorms, one detail from Noem's trip stands out: she hosted and personally served a barbecue dinner for Border Patrol agents in Arizona, and a separate dinner inside a Tucson hotel for CBP officers. These aren't photo ops that generate viral clips. They're the kind of unglamorous leadership gestures that matter to the people doing dangerous, thankless work along the border — work made harder by a political class that alternately ignores them and vilifies them.
An unnamed GOP insider told Fox News Digital that Noem's time as governor of South Dakota didn't prepare her for one of the most challenging roles in the presidential cabinet. Maybe. Or maybe the critics are measuring preparation by Washington standards, which tend to reward people who manage crises with press releases rather than plane tickets.
Noem's approach this week was simple: show up where the problems are, meet the people doing the work, and make your case to the camera with a border wall behind you instead of a podium. It's not subtle. It doesn't need to be.
Noem is scheduled to testify before a House committee next month. House Democrats will treat it as a prosecution. The impeachment shadow hearings signal where they intend to take this. The 58% disapproval number from Quinnipiac will be cited endlessly.
But here is what the disapproval crowd has to answer for: the border under Biden was an open wound. Thousands of people died in the crossing. Cartels ran human trafficking operations with near impunity. Communities across America absorbed the consequences of a federal government that refused to enforce its own laws. Noem and Homan inherited that wreckage and have overseen the removal of over 3 million people from the country in a matter of months.
As Noem put it, standing along the wall:
"What people need to remember is that Democrat policies were destroying our country. And President Trump came in and said, 'I'm going to protect the American people. It's not going to happen anymore.'"
"Since [the Biden administration], thousands of people's lives have been saved just here, just right here on the border, because those migrants are not victimized anymore."
That's the argument the left cannot afford to engage honestly. So they poll-test disapproval numbers and hold shadow hearings instead.
The border wall behind Noem in Nogales isn't just a physical barrier. It's the line between a country that enforces its laws and one that pretends they don't exist. For now, the woman standing in front of it shows no interest in stepping aside.