President Trump fired a pointed warning at British leaders this week after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a clean energy memorandum with U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband during a European diplomacy tour that has all the subtlety of a 2028 campaign launch.
In an interview with Politico, Trump called the partnership "inappropriate," adding a characteristically unsparing assessment of the arrangement.
"The U.K.'s got enough trouble without getting involved with Gavin Newscum."
The rebuke came after Newsom spent the past week globe-trotting through Munich, signing agreements with foreign governments and openly trashing the sitting president on the international stage. He attended the Munich Security Conference, inked a cooperation pact with the Lviv region of Ukraine, and told an international audience that the current administration is merely "temporary" and will be "gone in three years."
For a governor who insists he's just doing state business, that's a lot of foreign policy rhetoric.
As Fox News reported, Newsom's European swing included two headline-grabbing agreements. The first, signed on Saturday, was a pact with the Lviv region of Ukraine that would involve California companies in "rebuilding and resiliency" efforts across defense, energy, and digital technologies. The second was the clean energy memorandum with Miliband, which Newsom's office claims would facilitate "nearly a billion dollars in new investment."
These agreements are typically structured as nonbinding memoranda of understanding and do not carry the force of federal treaties. It's worth sitting with that for a moment. The governor of a single state is flying overseas, staging signing ceremonies with foreign officials, and projecting a dollar figure that his own office generated with no independent verification, all while the agreements themselves carry no legal weight.
The State Department has historically encouraged "subnational diplomacy," particularly on trade, and governors from both parties routinely lead overseas economic missions. But there is a canyon of difference between a trade mission and what Newsom is doing. Trade missions don't typically involve telling foreign audiences that the American president is a temporary inconvenience.
Newsom has long been viewed by political strategists and analysts as a possible Democratic presidential contender in 2028. Nothing about his behavior in Munich suggests otherwise. This is not a governor managing California's economic interests abroad. This is a second-term Democrat who has run out of runway in Sacramento and is building a brand for what comes next.
Consider the posture. At the Munich Security Conference, Newsom aimed not just at the White House but at every foreign leader who has engaged constructively with the Trump administration.
"I can't take this complicity of people rolling over. I mean, handing out crowns, the Nobel prizes that are being given away ... it's just pathetic."
He previously told reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that he "should have brought a bunch of knee pads" for world leaders who he believes have bowed down to the president's "transactional" diplomacy.
So the pitch to a Democratic primary electorate is taking shape:
It's audacious. It's also deeply unserious.
When Fox News Digital reached out for comment, Newsom's spokesperson delivered a response that read less like a governor's communications office and more like a campaign war room.
"Donald Trump is on his knees for coal and Big Oil, selling out America's future to China. Governor Newsom will continue to lead in his absence. Foreign leaders are rejecting Trump and choosing California's vision for the future."
Three sentences. Every single one is a campaign line. "Lead in his absence" does the most work: it frames Newsom not as a state executive cooperating with federal policy but as a rival head of state filling a vacuum. That's the 2028 thesis statement, delivered on the record by an official spokesperson.
The claim that "foreign leaders are rejecting Trump and choosing California's vision" is doing some heavy lifting as well. One energy secretary from a country currently navigating its own political turbulence signed a nonbinding memo. That's not a geopolitical realignment. It's a photo opportunity.
The deeper problem for Newsom is the contradiction sitting at the center of his argument. He wants to be taken seriously as a global leader while governing a state that can't keep its lights on during a heat wave, can't house its residents, and can't stop its population from fleeing to states with lower taxes and fewer regulations. He lectures foreign heads of state about growing a backbone while presiding over a state where small businesses buckle under compliance costs that Sacramento itself created.
Newsom insists California represents the future. But every U-Haul leaving Los Angeles for Austin tells a different story.
There's also the matter of federalism. Governors do not conduct foreign policy. They can promote trade. They can build economic relationships. But staging rival diplomatic events, signing agreements with wartime nations on defense cooperation, and publicly undermining the president's negotiating position with allies is something else entirely. It's not leadership. It's freelancing.
Trump's comments weren't just a swipe at Newsom. They were a message to any foreign government considering the California governor a back channel worth cultivating. When the president of the United States calls a partnership "inappropriate" and warns a nation's leaders by name, that registers in foreign ministries. Recent controversies over Arctic sovereignty and NATO funding have already tested relationships between Washington and its allies. No serious government wants to add friction with the White House over a nonbinding memo with Sacramento.
That's the part Newsom either doesn't understand or doesn't care about. Foreign leaders who engage with him aren't making a bet on California. They're making a bet against the current administration. And Trump just made clear that he's keeping score.
Newsom can fly to Munich. He can sign whatever memoranda he likes. He can call the president temporary. But the foreign leaders sitting across the table from him know something his spokesperson won't say out loud: a governor who has to travel six thousand miles to find an audience that takes him seriously has already told you everything about his standing at home.
An Obama-appointed federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to pay for airfare and provide travel documents to bring back hundreds of Venezuelan migrants—suspected members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang—who were deported to El Salvador. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Chief Judge James Boasberg issued the order Thursday, declaring the administration must "remedy the wrong that it perpetrated" by removing them from the country.
The migrants would be taken into custody upon arrival. But the core demand is extraordinary: a single district court judge compelling the executive branch to reverse a completed deportation, fund the return trip, and hand suspected gang members the paperwork to board flights back to American soil.
In March 2025, President Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to allow expedited removal of Venezuelan migrants suspected of belonging to TdA. This transnational criminal organization has embedded itself in American cities. Boasberg responded almost immediately with an order blocking those deportations.
The Supreme Court weighed in weeks later. In a 5-4 decision in April 2025, the justices lifted Boasberg's block, finding that the migrants had improperly challenged their deportations in Washington, D.C., when they should have done so in Texas. The highest court in the land said Boasberg's court wasn't even the right venue.
And yet according to Breitbart, here he is again—issuing orders from that same court, now demanding something far more dramatic than blocking a deportation. He wants one undone.
Boasberg framed his order as a matter of constitutional process. In his telling, the administration removed the migrants without affording them adequate opportunity to challenge their deportations:
"Were it otherwise, the Government could simply remove people from the United States without providing any process and then, once they were in a foreign country, deny them any right to return for a hearing or opportunity to present their case from abroad."
He further stated that the situation would never have arisen had the government afforded the plaintiffs their constitutional rights before initially deporting them.
Set aside the legal theory for a moment and consider the practical reality. These are suspected members of a violent Venezuelan gang. They were in the United States illegally. The president invoked a law that has been on the books since the John Adams administration to remove them. The Supreme Court sided with the administration on the jurisdictional question. And a district judge is now ordering the government to buy plane tickets to bring them back.
The Trump administration has agreed to return the men to immigration custody if they arrive at a U.S. airport or border station on their own. But Department of Justice attorneys are pushing back against providing the men with letters that would help them board flights to the United States—a critical distinction.
There is a canyon between "we won't block your return" and "we will actively facilitate it." Boasberg's order bridges that canyon by force, demanding the administration not merely permit reentry but engineer it—airfare, documents, the works.
This is where judicial overreach stops being an abstraction and becomes an operational mandate. A judge is ordering the executive branch to spend taxpayer money transporting suspected gang members back into the country, the executive branch just removed them from.
The sequence is now familiar. The administration enforces immigration law. A district court judge—often in D.C., often appointed by a Democratic president—intervenes. The case climbs toward the Supreme Court. The administration wins on the merits or on jurisdiction. And the same judge finds a new angle to reassert control.
Boasberg was already overruled once on this very matter. The Supreme Court told him the case didn't belong in his courtroom. His response was not deference but escalation—an order more sweeping than the one the Court struck down.
The left has spent years insisting that "no one is above the law." Apparently, that principle has a carve-out for federal judges who keep issuing orders after the Supreme Court pulls the rug out from under them.
Hundreds of illegal immigrants suspected of gang ties were removed from the United States under a lawful act of Congress signed in 1798. The Supreme Court cleared the way for those removals. No,w a lower court judge wants to put them on planes headed back.
If this order stands, the precedent it sets dwarfs this single case. Any future deportation could be reversed by a sympathetic judge claiming insufficient process—after the fact, from a courtroom the Supreme Court already said lacked jurisdiction. Enforcement becomes provisional. Removal becomes temporary. And the executive branch's core immigration authority exists only at the pleasure of whichever district judge gets the filing first.
The administration removed suspected gang members from American communities. A judge wants them returned. Somewhere in that gap lives the question of who actually governs immigration policy in the United States—and right now, one man in a black robe is making a compelling case that it's him.
Nearly eight in ten asylum seekers are now being turned away by immigration judges, a dramatic reversal from the Biden era that signals the most consequential shift in American immigration enforcement in years. In the last quarter, asylum grant rates plummeted to roughly 20% — down from 50% as recently as May 2022, when the southern border was hemorrhaging record numbers of illegal crossings.
The numbers aren't subtle. Deportations have topped 30,000 every month since Trump took office. In the most recent December on record, 38,215 illegal immigrants were removed — nearly double the 19,265 deported in December 2023 under Biden. Daily apprehensions at the border have cratered to 245, a 95% drop from the Biden-era average of 5,110 per day.
The floodgates didn't close themselves. This is what happens when an administration decides the immigration system should enforce the law rather than process an invasion.
The Trump administration has pursued a two-pronged strategy: remove judges who weren't doing their jobs, and replace them with people who will. Over the past year, the administration fired in excess of 100 immigration judges. This month alone, the Department of Justice hired 33 new ones. Another 36 were brought on in October. The Pentagon has been reassigning Judge Advocate General lawyers from the military to immigration courts on temporary assignments to attack the backlog.
The results are measurable. Immigration courts are now completing roughly 12,000 cases per month — nearly double the 6,000 to 7,000 monthly caseloads under Biden.
The DOJ framed the overhaul bluntly:
"After four years of Biden administration hiring practices that undermined the credibility and impartiality of the immigration courts, this Department of Justice continues to restore integrity to our immigration system."
The New York Bar Association expressed "deep concern" over the judicial firings, which is roughly as surprising as the sun rising in the east. But the math tells a different story than the legal establishment's hand-wringing. A 3.38 million-case backlog still looms — and even at the current accelerated pace, clearing it would take an estimated 14 years. Queens County alone carries 105,635 pending cases, the third-largest backlog in the country, as New York Post reports.
When the system is that broken, half-measures aren't reforms. They're window dressing.
Michael Cutler, who spent 30 years as an agent at the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, offered a corrective that shouldn't need offering but clearly does:
"If you look at what asylum is supposed to be, it's a very narrow definition . . . You have to be able to demonstrate a credible fear and be able to articulate that credible fear of persecution."
He drove the point further:
"It's not because there's a gang that's doing business down the block or you can't stand your mother in law or you can't find a job."
For years, the asylum system was treated as a general-purpose admissions program. Anyone who showed up at the border and uttered the right words was funneled into a process that could take years to resolve — years spent living and working in the United States, often with little incentive to appear for a hearing that might never come. The 50% grant rate under Biden wasn't evidence of legitimate persecution on a massive scale. It was evidence of a system that had abandoned its own standards.
Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Policy and a former immigration judge himself, connected the dots:
"It's having a real impact. The Trump Administration is doing all kinds of things to drive down the asylum grant rate."
"Drive down" is doing interesting work in that sentence. A more honest framing: the grant rate is returning to something resembling what asylum law was designed to produce.
The policy debate never stays abstract for long. Not when the consequences have names.
Laken Riley was killed while jogging at the University of Georgia in 2024, murdered by an illegal immigrant. Rachel Morin, a Maryland mother of five, was raped and killed in 2023. Her attacker, illegal immigrant Victor Martinez-Hernandez from El Salvador, received a life sentence. Matthew Denice was 23 when he was killed by a drunk-driving illegal immigrant from Ecuador in Milford, Massachusetts, in 2011.
These cases became flashpoints not because they were isolated, but because they were preventable. Every one of them involved someone who should not have been in the country.
Patricia Morin, Rachel's mother, told The Post what millions of Americans already understood:
"That's what American voted for, they voted for safety… this is the top issue that got him elected, and he's keeping his word."
She didn't stop there:
"Democrats keep talking about how bad all this is and it's not compassionate, but it's not virtue when you only give compassion to the criminal and don't give a second thought to the victim who has died."
That's the contradiction the left has never been able to answer. Compassion without accountability isn't compassion — it's negligence with better branding.
The scale of what the Trump administration inherited is worth sitting with. In 2022, Customs and Border Protection reported 2.76 million people crossed the southern border — a record. In 2023, more than 2.4 million migrants arrived at the Southwest border, with 3.2 million encounters nationwide. By August 2023, 70% of Americans disapproved of Biden's handling of the border in national polls.
Seventy percent. In a country that can't agree on pizza toppings, seven in ten Americans looked at the border and saw the same thing: failure.
Biden's own words from a 2019 Iowa campaign event aged like milk left in the sun:
"We could afford to take in a heartbeat, another 4 million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre."
He got his wish. Americans have a 3.38 million-case asylum backlog, overwhelmed courts, and communities paying the price for policies designed to sound generous on a debate stage rather than function in reality.
Maureen Maloney, vice president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, has been fighting for tighter borders since her son Matthew was killed in 2011. She didn't mince words:
"What Biden did to this country with the open borders was treason and Americans will be paying the price for many years to come."
She also acknowledged the sheer scale of the problem now facing enforcement:
"It's impossible for President Trump to deport however many millions of illegal aliens that have come across the border during the Biden administration."
Even with courts running at double capacity, even with deportations exceeding 30,000 a month, the math remains brutal. A 14-year timeline to clear the existing backlog means the damage from the Biden years will outlast multiple administrations. The top destinations for deportees — Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela, in that order — represent a pipeline that took years to build and won't be dismantled overnight.
But the trajectory has reversed. Courts are adjudicating cases faster. Judges with military backgrounds are applying the law as written rather than as activists wish it read. The asylum grant rate reflects what the statute demands — a narrow, specific standard of persecution — not a generalized sympathy for anyone who makes the journey north.
Patricia Morin put it simply:
"We have all these unvetted people that are here in America and we don't know if they really are who they say they are."
That used to be an unremarkable observation. Somewhere along the way, it became a controversial one. The fact that it no longer drives policy paralysis is the most important shift of all.
New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores told the world he walked away from Palantir — and millions of dollars — because he couldn't stomach the company's work with ICE.
A Bloomberg News report tells a different story: Bores resigned in February 2019, just five days after Palantir's legal department notified him of potential disciplinary action over sexually explicit comments allegedly made to a colleague.
Five days. Not a principled stand. A hasty exit.
The New York Post reported that Bores, 35, is now running to replace retiring Rep. Jerrold Nadler in Manhattan's heavily Democratic 12th Congressional District — a race where his origin story as a tech worker who chose conscience over cash is central to his pitch. That pitch now has a credibility problem.
On January 23, Bores posted on X with the kind of moral clarity candidates love to project:
"I quit Palantir over its ICE contract, choosing principle over my career and millions of dollars."
He followed that with a second post framing himself as the target of corporate retaliation:
"They profited off of it, and are now using those funds to lie to New Yorkers and attack me."
It's a tidy narrative. A young software engineer stares down a powerful defense contractor, sacrifices a lucrative career, and emerges on the other side as a public servant. The kind of story Democratic primary voters in Manhattan devour.
Except Bloomberg's reporting — based on people familiar with the matter — suggests the timeline doesn't hold up.
According to the report, Bores worked at Palantir from 2014 to 2019. During his first year, he attended a client offsite meeting with Kimberly-Clark where an employee reportedly referenced tissue usage data and made what was described as an implicit reference to masturbation — noting that the top three reported tissue uses accounted for less than half of total usage, with the implication being obvious.
Years later, Bores allegedly recounted that anecdote to a colleague. A complaint was filed. Palantir's legal department sent Bores a notification of potential disciplinary action. Five days after that notification, he was gone.
Bloomberg's sources also reported that in his exit interview, Bores cited burnout and excessive travel — not ICE contracts — as his reasons for leaving.
Bores' spokeswoman, Alyssa Cass, pushed back aggressively. She called the Bloomberg report:
"A wildly overblown characterization from 'sources' within a company that has named Alex Bores public enemy #1."
Cass acknowledged the basics — that a complaint was filed and HR spoke to Bores about it — but disputed everything else. She told The Post:
"A complaint was filed, and HR asked Alex about it."
She added that:
"The matter was dropped."
As for the five-day timeline between the warning letter and his departure, Cass called it:
"Made up and the timeline proves it."
She said Bores had already secured another job offer before leaving Palantir. After his departure, he joined an AI-focused startup and later worked at fintech firm Promise Pay before launching a political career that landed him in the New York State Assembly in 2022.
Let's stipulate that retelling an off-color story from a client meeting may not be the scandal of the century. Workplace complaints exist on a spectrum, and the underlying incident — repeating a crude joke about tissue usage data — is hardly Harvey Weinstein territory.
But that's not the issue. The issue is that Bores built a campaign narrative around a noble resignation that appears, at minimum, to have been significantly more complicated than he let on. He didn't just omit context.
He actively constructed a heroic version of events and used it to fundraise, campaign, and position himself as a man of principle in a crowded Democratic primary.
If the Bloomberg timeline is accurate, Bores didn't quit Palantir to fight ICE. He quit Palantir because the walls were closing in — and then retrofitted the story into a political asset years later.
That's not a misjudgment. That's a fabrication strategy.
This is a familiar playbook on the progressive left: claim moral authority not from what you've actually done, but from the story you tell about what you've done. The résumé becomes mythology. The mythology becomes the campaign. And anyone who questions it is accused of acting in bad faith — in this case, supposedly on behalf of a vengeful corporation.
Bores has made artificial intelligence regulation and opposition to the ICE centerpieces of his congressional campaign. Both positions play well in a Manhattan district where the primary is the only election that matters.
But if the foundation of his candidacy — the reason voters should trust his judgment and his character — is a story that doesn't survive contact with a Bloomberg FOIA request, what exactly is he selling?
Financial disclosures show Bores and his wife hold between $2 million and $3.7 million in combined assets. He's not the scrappy idealist who gave it all up. He's a multimillionaire former tech worker who left one lucrative gig, moved through two more, and then decided to run for office with a convenient origin story.
The Post sought comment from both Palantir and Kimberly-Clark. Neither responded by publication time. Bloomberg's sources remain anonymous. The colleague who filed the complaint has not been identified.
That leaves voters in the 12th District with a straightforward question: Do you trust the man who told you one story, or the reporting that suggests it was another?
In a district that will almost certainly send a Democrat to Congress, the primary is everything. And in a primary, character is supposed to matter. Bores asked voters to believe he sacrificed millions for principle. Now they'll have to decide whether that sacrifice ever actually happened — or whether it was just another line on a carefully curated campaign page.
Manhattan Democrats deserve better than a candidate whose founding myth crumbles under basic reporting. Then again, they keep electing the ones whose myths crumble slowest.
Hillary Clinton stepped off a first-class ICE high-speed train at platform 22 in Munich's central station on Thursday, surrounded by aides and flanked by an armed German Federal police officer. The former Secretary of State had just completed the four-hour rail journey from Berlin — reportedly because a nationwide airline strike grounded hundreds of flights across Germany, including the ten hourly Lufthansa shuttles that normally run between the two cities.
The image writes itself: a former U.S. presidential candidate, once accustomed to Air Force jets and motorcades, climbing down from a Deutsche Bahn carriage because German unions decided Thursday was the day to walk off the job over retirement benefits.
Michaela Kuefner, Chief Political Editor at Deutsche Welle News, captured the scene:
"Hillary Clinton arrives by train from Berlin… No hassle from people asking about those files. No hot drinks because of a power failure in the bistro for half the trip."
No hot drinks. A power failure in the bistro car. It's the kind of detail that needs no editorial seasoning.
Clinton arrived ahead of the Munich Security Conference, which runs Friday through Sunday. But as Breitbart News reported, the real story isn't who's arriving by rail — it's the shadow that still hangs over this conference from last year, when Vice President JD Vance walked onto the same stage and delivered a speech that left Europe's diplomatic establishment in visible distress.
Vance, serving as President Trump's emissary, challenged European leaders directly on their own democratic commitments:
"For years we've been told everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values… But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials, threatening to cancel others, we have to ask if we are holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves because I fundamentally think we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them."
Conference boss Christoph Heusgen — a top German diplomat — broke down in tears in response. The speech forced a conversation that European elites had spent years avoiding: whether the continent's increasingly heavy-handed approach to speech regulation and electoral intervention was compatible with the democratic values it claimed to defend.
That conversation clearly hasn't ended.
This year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio leads the U.S. delegation. According to the Associated Press, the conference "warily" awaits his arrival — a revealing word choice. U.S. officials indicated his speech is intended to be "less contentious but philosophically similar" to Vance's 2025 address.
Read that framing carefully. The AP treats an American official speaking plainly about democratic principles as something a European security conference must brace for. The wariness isn't about substance — it's about the discomfort that comes when someone says out loud what polite diplomatic circles would rather leave unsaid.
"Philosophically similar" is the key phrase. The administration isn't retreating from the core message Vance delivered. It's delivering it through a different voice, with a different tone — but the substance holds. Europe's allies are expected to live by the values they invoke when asking for American support. That's not contentious. That's the baseline.
What, exactly, brings Hillary Clinton to the Munich Security Conference in the current moment? The fact sheet doesn't say, and Clinton herself offered no public remarks upon arrival. She is there, presumably, in some unofficial capacity — a former Secretary of State still orbiting the international circuit that once defined her career.
There's an irony worth noting. Clinton arrives at a conference still reverberating from Vance's challenge to European democratic backsliding — the very kind of frank, uncomfortable diplomacy that the foreign policy establishment she represents spent decades avoiding. The old guard traveled to Munich to reassure. The current administration travels to Munich to recalibrate.
Meanwhile, Lufthansa told passengers with grounded domestic flights they could exchange tickets at no extra cost for Deutsche Bahn train passes. Hundreds of flights were cancelled in a single day because unions walked out over retirement benefits. Germany's infrastructure, once the pride of European efficiency, reduced Clinton and countless other travelers to four-hour rail commutes with no hot coffee.
The Munich Security Conference used to function as a comfortable annual ritual — Western leaders affirming their shared commitment to the transatlantic order, exchanging pleasantries, and returning home having changed nothing. Vance broke that pattern last year. Rubio appears poised to maintain it this year, not with provocation for its own sake, but with the simple insistence that words and actions align.
That shouldn't be a radical proposition. The fact that European diplomats greet it with tears and wariness tells you everything about how far the gap between rhetoric and reality has stretched.
Clinton rode the train to Munich. The world she helped build is the one being asked to account for itself when she gets there.
A federal judge struck down California's ban on face coverings for federal law enforcement officers this week, handing the Trump administration a clean legal victory and exposing a rift between Governor Gavin Newsom and the state senator who authored the law.
Judge Christina Snyder blocked enforcement of the mask ban on Monday while upholding a separate California law requiring federal agents to visibly display identification. The ruling turned on a straightforward problem: the law banned federal agents from covering their faces during operations but exempted state and local police. The court deemed that the carve-out was unfair.
The result is a law that was designed to obstruct federal immigration enforcement — struck down because its authors couldn't even write it consistently.
Newsom signed the mask ban last fall in response to ICE officers wearing face coverings during immigration operations in Los Angeles. At the time, the governor framed the issue in the most dramatic terms possible:
"Masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, people disappearing, no due process, no oversight, zero accountability, happening in the United States of America today."
"These are authoritarian actions by an authoritarian government."
State Senator Scott Wiener authored the bill and reportedly intended it to apply to all law enforcement — federal, state, and local. But the version Newsom signed exempted state police, a carve-out that reportedly came from negotiations with the governor's own office, according to the Daily Mail.
That exemption became the law's fatal flaw. You cannot argue that masked law enforcement is a threat to civil liberties and then protect the right of your own state troopers to do the same thing. The court noticed.
What followed the ruling was not a unified Democratic response. It was a public finger-pointing exercise.
Newsom's press office wasted no time putting the loss on Wiener:
"Mr. Wiener rejected our proposed fixes to his bill — language that was later included in the identification bill the court upheld today. He chose a different approach, and today the court found his approach unlawful."
Wiener, for his part, immediately pledged to try again:
"Now that the Court has made clear that state officers must be included, I am immediately introducing new legislation to include state officers. We will unmask these thugs and hold them accountable. Full stop."
So the governor's team says the senator refused their fixes. The senator says he'll write a new version that does what the governor apparently wanted all along. The only people who came out of this with a clear message were the ones who sued to stop it.
Attorney General Pam Bondi framed the ruling as part of a broader pattern of courtroom success:
"Following our arguments, a district court in California BLOCKED the enforcement of a law that would have banned federal agents from wearing masks to protect their identities."
"These federal agents are harassed, doxxed, obstructed, and attacked on a regular basis just for doing their jobs. We have no tolerance for it."
"We will continue fighting and winning in court for President Trump's law-and-order agenda."
The Trump administration sued to block the mask ban back in November, arguing California lacked the authority to regulate federal agents. The Department of Homeland Security urged authorities to ignore the law entirely. The court's ruling vindicated that position.
There's a reason ICE agents wear face coverings during operations. They work in hostile environments where activists film them, post their faces online, and target them for harassment. Bondi's statement pointed to a reality that California's leadership would prefer to ignore: the people enforcing immigration law face real threats from the people who oppose it.
This was never really about masks. It was about obstruction — finding any procedural lever to make federal immigration enforcement harder, slower, and more dangerous for the agents carrying it out. If you can force agents to show their faces, you give the doxxing machine fresh ammunition. If you can tie up enforcement operations in state-level compliance requirements, you create friction where the federal government is supposed to operate freely.
Newsom tipped his hand on Tuesday when he suggested the ruling should inspire a federal mask ban:
"Based on the court's decision, I think we should move in the opposite direction. We should have a federal mask ban."
"I don't believe federal agents should be running roughshod over the Constitution, putting communities that are already on edge in more terror and more distress by having masks on. No other law enforcement agency operates like this."
The governor's office added:
"No badge and no name mean no accountability."
But the court upheld the identification requirement. Federal agents will be required to visibly display identification. That's the accountability mechanism — and it survived. The mask ban was something else entirely, and the court saw through it.
Wiener says he'll reintroduce the legislation with state officers included. Whether Newsom signs a version that applies to his own state police remains an open question — and a revealing one. It's easy to demand transparency from federal agents enforcing laws you don't like. It's harder when the same standard applies to officers under your command.
California's Democratic leadership wanted to build a legal wall around illegal immigrants. Instead, they built a law so poorly constructed that it collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy. The court didn't need to reach the federal supremacy question. The equal protection problem was enough.
When your law fails because you carved out an exception for your own side, the court isn't handing your opponents a win. You handed it to them yourself.
Hillary and Bill Clinton are now objecting to the videotaping of their private depositions before the House Oversight Committee — depositions they already agreed to sit for. The dispute threatens to derail scheduled appearances on Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 in connection with the committee's probe into Jeffrey Epstein.
The agreement for those depositions halted the House from moving forward with a floor vote to hold the Clintons in criminal contempt of Congress. That deal, reached after a months-long back-and-forth between Clinton lawyers and the committee, appeared to settle the matter. Now the Clintons want to rewrite the terms.
Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, posted a statement Friday framing the entire process as a partisan setup:
"Chairman Comer says he wants cameras, but only behind closed doors. It serves only partisan interests. This is not fact-finding, it's pure politics."
He followed that with a sharper line:
"I will not sit idly as they use me as a prop in a closed-door kangaroo court."
The rhetoric is unmistakable. A former president who agreed to appear under oath is now publicly campaigning against the conditions of that appearance — conditions his own legal team negotiated.
Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, the Kentucky Republican, responded over the weekend with considerably less theatrics and considerably more documentation, Punchbowl News reported. His committee released correspondence with the Clintons' legal team showing that video guidelines were discussed throughout the negotiation process. Recording depositions, Comer noted, is common practice for House proceedings.
"The Clintons are now pushing a false narrative to play victim."
Comer also made clear that the Clintons' preferred alternative — public hearings — isn't off the table. It's just not a substitute for the depositions they already committed to:
"The Clintons can have their hearing after completing the depositions they agreed to."
That distinction matters. A deposition is a fact-finding tool — questions under oath, follow-ups, and detailed examination. A public hearing is a performance stage. The Clintons aren't asking for more transparency. They're asking for a format where cameras serve their interests, where opening statements and five-minute rounds replace sustained questioning.
Anyone who's watched a congressional hearing knows the difference. Depositions produce answers. Hearings produce clips.
While the Clintons wage a media campaign against sitting for questions, Ghislaine Maxwell was scheduled to be deposed virtually by the Oversight Committee today. According to Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, Maxwell's lawyers have indicated she intends to invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
That backdrop makes the Clinton maneuvering all the more striking. Maxwell, according to a New York Times report published Sunday, was integral in setting up the Clinton Global Initiative, including helping set up funding for it. The committee is probing the Clintons' relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell — Epstein's most notorious associate — helped build the infrastructure of one of the Clintons' signature philanthropic ventures.
And she's pleading the Fifth.
The Clintons, for their part, aren't invoking any constitutional right. They're not claiming privilege. They're complaining about cameras — in depositions they agreed to, under terms their lawyers helped shape, to avoid being held in criminal contempt of Congress.
The Clinton playbook here is vintage. Agree to cooperate when the legal pressure peaks. Then, once the contempt threat recedes, contest the terms. Shift the argument from substance to process. Call it partisan. Call it a kangaroo court. Make the investigation the story instead of what the investigation might uncover.
It worked for decades in Washington. The question is whether it works now, with a committee that holds the contempt card and has already shown willingness to play it.
Consider the sequence: the Clintons' lawyers negotiated for months. They reached a deal. The deal prevented a criminal contempt vote. Video was discussed throughout those negotiations, per the committee's own correspondence. And now — with the deposition days away — Bill Clinton takes to social media to recast the entire arrangement as an ambush.
If the videotaping terms were unacceptable, the time to reject them was during the months of negotiation, not two weeks before the deposition date. The timing suggests this isn't a procedural objection. It's a pressure campaign designed to either extract new concessions or manufacture a pretext for non-compliance.
The Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 dates remain on the calendar. If the Clintons refuse to appear under the agreed-upon terms, the contempt question resurfaces — this time with even less sympathy for the subjects, who struck a deal and then tried to wriggle out of it.
Meanwhile, Maxwell invokes the Fifth from behind a screen, and a New York Times report draws a line between her and the financial scaffolding of the Clinton Global Initiative. The committee's probe is pulling threads that the Clintons clearly prefer stay untugged.
Bill Clinton says he won't be a "prop." But a man who voluntarily agreed to testify under oath, then launched a public campaign to avoid the format he negotiated, isn't fighting for principle. He's fighting for control of the frame.
The cameras, it turns out, are only a problem when you can't pick the angle.
A Hong Kong court sentenced 78-year-old media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison Monday under Beijing's national security law, drawing immediate condemnation from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who called the verdict "unjust and tragic" and urged Chinese authorities to grant Lai humanitarian parole.
Lai — the founder of Apple Daily, once Hong Kong's most prominent pro-democracy newspaper — was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of conspiracy to publish seditious materials. Judges labeled him the "mastermind" of alleged plots to use his media platform and international network to lobby foreign governments for sanctions against China and Hong Kong.
His crime, in plain terms: running a newspaper that criticized Beijing.
Rubio's statement, reported by Fox News, left no ambiguity about how Washington views the conviction:
"The conviction shows the world that Beijing will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong."
Prosecutors cited hundreds of Apple Daily articles as evidence against Lai. Let that register — a government cataloging journalism as proof of criminal conspiracy. The newspaper Lai founded in 1995 became, under Beijing's 2020 national security law, Exhibit A in a case designed not merely to punish one man but to demonstrate what happens to anyone who dissents.
Lai had already spent more than five years behind bars, serving a separate sentence for fraud and for organizing unauthorized assemblies during Hong Kong's anti-CCP protests. The 20-year addition isn't a sentence. For a 78-year-old man, it's a burial order with extra paperwork.
His son Sebastian Lai put it bluntly:
"Twenty years, he's 78 years old now. This is essentially a life sentence — or more like a death sentence, given the conditions he's being kept in."
Sebastian told Fox on Monday that his father has lost significant weight and suffers from heart issues and diabetes. He said the family is "incredibly worried about his life."
What makes Lai's case remarkable — and what separates it from the stories of countless other political prisoners around the world — is that he had every opportunity to leave. Lai is a billionaire. He had the means, the connections, and the warning signs. Beijing's national security law swept through Hong Kong in 2020 after months of massive pro-democracy protests, reshaping the city's legal landscape. Lai knew what was coming.
He stayed anyway.
Sebastian Lai described his father as "a man of deep faith" who believes "no matter how hard the conditions he was under, that he still did the right thing." That's not political theater. That's conviction of the kind that embarrasses regimes built on coercion, which is precisely why Beijing wants him locked away until he dies.
President Trump raised Lai's case directly with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in December 2025. His comments at the time were characteristically direct:
"I spoke to President Xi about it, and I asked to consider his release. He's not well, he's an older man, and he's not well, so I did put that request out. We'll see what happens."
Trump is expected to travel to Beijing in April amid broader negotiations with China. Lai's imprisonment now sits squarely within the wider framework of U.S.-China relations — trade, Taiwan, military posture, and the question of whether Beijing faces any real cost for crushing internal dissent.
Rubio's public call for humanitarian parole adds diplomatic weight. It signals that Lai's case isn't a side issue to be quietly shelved during trade talks — it's on the table.
The national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 was sold as a stabilizing measure. In practice, it has become the instrument through which a once-vibrant city was brought to heel. The prosecution of Jimmy Lai — a publisher, not a general — tells you everything about the kind of "stability" Beijing values. It's the stability of silence.
Prosecutors argued Lai and unnamed co-defendants used his media platform to lobby for sanctions and "other hostile actions" by foreign governments. The colonial-era Crimes Ordinance was dusted off and applied alongside the national security regime to convict him of publishing seditious materials. A law written by the British Empire, repurposed by the Chinese Communist Party, to jail a man for printing newspapers.
Sebastian Lai argued that Beijing's broken "one country, two systems" promise should serve as a warning for Taiwan. He has a point. Whatever guarantees Beijing extends to its neighbors, Hong Kong is the proof of concept — and the proof is a 78-year-old man sentenced to die in prison for the crime of publishing.
Jimmy Lai built Apple Daily into a media force that gave Hong Kong's people a voice Beijing could not tolerate. He could have taken his fortune and left. He chose the newspaper, the city, and the principle over his own freedom.
Twenty years. Hundreds of articles entered as evidence. A courtroom that called journalism a conspiracy.
Beijing delivered its verdict on Jimmy Lai. In doing so, it delivered a verdict on itself.
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.
An NYPD narcotics sergeant has been convicted of second-degree manslaughter after he hurled a cooler filled with drinks at a fleeing drug suspect, killing the man when he crashed his motorized scooter and slammed into a tree. Sgt. Erik Duran, 38, now faces up to 15 years in prison.
Judge Guy Mitchell delivered the verdict on Friday in Bronx criminal court following a bench trial — no jury, just a judge weighing the facts alone. The conviction makes Duran the first NYPD officer in years to be tried for killing someone while on duty. He has already been dismissed from the department.
Sentencing is scheduled for March 19.
On August 23, 2023, authorities say 30-year-old Eric Duprey sold drugs to an undercover officer in the Bronx and then fled the scene on a motorized scooter. Duran, part of the narcotics unit conducting the operation, grabbed a nearby red cooler packed with ice, water, and sodas, and threw it at Duprey as he rode away.
Duprey — who was not wearing a helmet — lost control of the scooter, crashed into a tree, landed on the pavement, and slid beneath a parked car. Prosecutors said he sustained fatal head injuries and died almost instantaneously.
Security footage captured Duran grabbing and hurling the cooler.
Duran testified in his own defense this week, telling the court he acted in a split-second to protect himself and fellow officers from the oncoming scooter:
"He was gonna crash into us. I didn't have time. All I had time for was to try again to stop or to try to get him to change directions. That's all I had the time to think of."
He also said he immediately tried to render aid after seeing the extent of Duprey's injuries. The judge wasn't persuaded. Mitchell convicted Duran of second-degree manslaughter while dismissing the assault charge, finding that prosecutors had failed to show Duran intended to hurt Duprey. He did not deliver a verdict on the lesser criminally negligent homicide charge, having already found Duran guilty on the more serious count, as NY 1 reports.
Mitchell's statement from the bench was pointed:
"The fact that the defendant is a police officer has no bearing. He's a person and will be treated as any other defendant."
On its face, this sounds like equal justice. In practice, it strips away the entire context of why Duran was on that street in the first place — executing a narcotics operation against a man who had just sold drugs to an undercover officer and was actively fleeing. Duran didn't wander into a confrontation. He was doing the job the city asked him to do.
That doesn't automatically excuse the cooler throw. But to say the badge "has no bearing" is to pretend that policing doesn't involve split-second decisions in chaotic, dangerous environments that civilians never face. A construction worker who throws a cooler in a parking lot dispute and a narcotics officer trying to stop a fleeing suspect are not in the same situation, no matter how badly the court wants to flatten the distinction.
The Sergeants Benevolent Association called the conviction a "miscarriage of justice" and said it still believes Duran was innocent. In a statement, the union laid out what many officers across the city are likely thinking:
"The verdict rendered by Judge Mitchell is clearly against the weight of the credible evidence. Verdicts such as this send a terrible message to hard-working cops: should you use force to defend yourself, your fellow police officers or the citizens of the City, no matter how justified your actions, you risk criminal charges and conviction."
That message will land whether city leaders want it to or not. Officers already working in a department demoralized by years of anti-police rhetoric, progressive prosecution, and revolving-door criminal justice now watch a colleague face 15 years for a decision made in seconds during an active narcotics bust. The calculus for every cop in New York just shifted — not toward better policing, but toward less policing. Toward hesitation. Toward doing nothing and letting the suspect ride away.
That's the incentive structure this conviction creates, regardless of whether it was legally sound.
The case was prosecuted by the office of State Attorney General Letitia James, who stated after the verdict:
"Though it cannot return Eric to his loved ones, today's decision gives justice to his memory."
James has built her career on high-profile prosecutions with political resonance. Her office taking the lead here — rather than the local district attorney — is itself a statement about the kind of cases Albany wants to pursue. Prosecuting an NYPD officer for a death that occurred during a drug bust against a suspect who was actively fleeing fits neatly into a progressive framework where police force is treated as inherently suspect and criminal suspects are treated as inherently sympathetic.
Eric Duprey's death is a tragedy. A 30-year-old man is dead. His wife, Orlyanis Velez, spoke outside the courthouse:
"I was waiting for justice just like everybody, but when the moment happens, you can't believe it's happening. It's been a lot of time. These people been killing citizens, been killing everybody. They don't give no reason."
Her grief is real. But the broader narrative her words were woven into — that police officers are systematically "killing citizens" without reason — is the same narrative that has driven anti-police policy in New York for years. Duprey was not stopped at random. He was not an innocent bystander. He had, according to authorities, just completed a drug sale to an undercover officer and was fleeing a narcotics operation.
None of that means he deserved to die. But the refusal to acknowledge even the basic circumstances of the encounter — a drug deal, a flight from law enforcement, a split-second response — tells you everything about how this case will be used politically.
The NYPD confirmed Duran's dismissal in a statement citing New York State Public Officers Law:
"Pursuant to New York State Public Officers Law, a public officer who is convicted of a felony automatically ceases to hold that position."
Automatic. No review, no appeal within the department. A felony conviction and the career is over by operation of law. Duran's attorney and police union representatives had not responded to requests for comment on potential appeals at the time of reporting.
Duran faces sentencing on March 19, where a judge will decide how many of those 15 possible years he'll serve. The decision will be watched closely — not just by Duran's family, but by every officer in the NYPD, weighing whether the risks of proactive policing are still worth taking.
New York asked its officers to get drugs off the street. One of them did, and now he's a felon. The next officer won't throw a cooler. He also won't chase the suspect. He'll stand there, watch the scooter disappear, and file a report that nobody reads.
That's the city Letitia James is building.