David Plouffe, the strategist who helped engineer Barack Obama's rise to the presidency, told Joe Biden to his face that he could not win the 2016 presidential race. The University of Virginia's Miller Center published an interview on Monday in which Plouffe detailed the private conversations, painting a picture of a vice president who was grieving, outmatched, and ultimately talked out of a campaign by operatives who saw no viable path forward.
But Plouffe didn't stop at 2016. He turned his attention to the wreckage of 2024, saying the Democratic Party has still not fully confronted how it handled the nominations of both Biden and Kamala Harris.
Plouffe described being tasked with delivering the message directly to Biden, who was grieving the death of his son Beau and was already well behind Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in any realistic primary calculus. His approach was blunt, Fox News noted:
"What I would say is: 'Listen, sir, first of all, I'm concerned about you as a human being. I'm not sure you're in a state to run. But if this was six, seven months ago, it's a different conversation. There's no room. There's just no room for you.'"
Plouffe walked Biden through the math state by state. Iowa was tough. New Hampshire belonged to Sanders. South Carolina was Clinton's territory. The two frontrunners had locked up an estimated 80 percent of the primary electorate between them, and Biden's natural lane of white working-class and union voters was already split.
"And by the way, Hillary's not going to implode."
Sanders, Plouffe added, wouldn't implode either. By the time Biden "kicked the tires" on a run, the field was fully developed with two formidable vote-getting candidates. There simply was no oxygen left.
Plouffe revealed that the push to get Biden into the race wasn't coming from any broad groundswell of Democratic support. It was coming from a handful of wealthy backers playing armchair strategist:
"'Well, donors are telling us to run.' I'm like, 'Well, I know these donors. Let's talk about them.' It was a couple guys in California. I'm like, 'That's not a campaign.'"
The portrait here is telling. A few rich men in California whispered encouragement to a grieving vice president, and "a couple of people around him" amplified the message until it almost became momentum. Plouffe's job was to inject reality into the fantasy. Biden, he said, ultimately accepted the verdict, though the people around him were harder to convince.
Plouffe was also remarkably candid about how the Democratic establishment viewed Biden's trajectory at the time. Obama had rescued Biden's career by putting him on the ticket. Before Beau's death, Biden had been clear he wasn't going to run. The narrative of the reluctant warrior being drafted by popular demand was, in Plouffe's telling, more fiction than fact.
"It's like, Poor Joe. And my view is, listen, Biden's career was over. Obama picked him to be vice president. And Biden was very clear he wasn't going to run even before Beau [died]."
That's an Obama insider describing Biden's political viability as essentially a product of Obama's generosity. Not exactly the mythology the Biden camp spent years constructing.
The most consequential portion of the interview wasn't about 2016 at all. Plouffe pivoted to 2024, where the same party that sidelined Biden a decade earlier propped him up for reelection, then panicked, forced him out, and installed Kamala Harris as the nominee without a single primary vote.
Plouffe said the maneuver cost Democrats more than they realize:
"It really bothered voters more than I thought it would and kind of undercut any kind of authority around the danger Trump posed."
Think about what he's admitting. The central argument of the Harris campaign was that the election was an existential battle for democracy. But voters watched the party bypass its own democratic process to anoint a candidate, and the hypocrisy gutted the message. You cannot demand that voters treat democracy as sacred while rigging your own nomination.
Plouffe went further, connecting two threads that Democratic leadership has tried to keep separate: the installation of Harris and the perception that party insiders covered up Biden's decline.
"And by the way, all these Democrats, as they saw it, had covered up Biden. And so, you put that together, which is Kamala kind of being installed in there and then the cover-up on Biden, as voters saw it. I mean, I don't think the party has fully come to a full reckoning on that."
He's right that they haven't. And they won't, because a full reckoning would require admitting that:
Plouffe said as much plainly:
"I don't think we should belabor it, but I think every Democrat should obviously say, 'Of course he shouldn't have run. We know that now. A good president shouldn't have run.' And we should never again have a nominee that isn't fully vetted by the voters and chosen by the voters."
What makes Plouffe's interview remarkable isn't any single revelation. It's the pattern it illuminates across nearly a decade of Democratic politics. In 2016, insiders told Biden he couldn't run because the field was locked up for Clinton. In 2024, insiders told Biden he couldn't stay because the polls had turned against him. In both cases, the decision was made in private by strategists, donors, and operatives. In neither case did Democratic voters drive the outcome.
The party that lectures America about the sanctity of elections has spent the better part of ten years deciding its nominations in back rooms. Clinton was the anointed one in 2016. Biden was propped up in 2024 until he couldn't be propped up anymore. Harris was installed without a single ballot cast in her favor.
Plouffe seems to understand the problem intellectually. Whether his party has the capacity to act on it is another question entirely. The same institutional impulses that cleared the field for Clinton, that shielded Biden from scrutiny, and that handed the nomination to Harris without a contest are still in charge. The strategists haven't changed. The donors haven't changed. The instinct to manage outcomes from above hasn't changed.
Every Democrat should say Biden shouldn't have run, Plouffe insists. But they won't. Because saying it means admitting they knew, and admitting they knew means admitting they chose power over honesty.
That's not a reckoning. That's a confession. And confessions require a kind of courage this party has shown no interest in summoning.
Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma Republican tapped by President Trump to lead the Department of Homeland Security, has been confirmed by the United States Senate. The vote fell 54-45 on Monday evening, clearing the simple majority needed to install a new secretary at an agency under enormous pressure on multiple fronts.
Mullin replaces Kristi Noem, who was fired by Trump earlier this month. He inherits an agency grappling with TSA agents going without pay, ICE agents deployed to airports to manage growing chaos, and a Congress still at a standstill over funding. The inbox is full. The building is on fire. And the new boss is a former MMA fighter with an undefeated record.
There are worse résumés for the moment.
Two Democrats crossed party lines to back Mullin's confirmation: John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. Fetterman had also crossed party lines to support the nominee during the committee vote, which advanced the nomination on Thursday after a hearing last Wednesday, the Daily Mail reported.
On the Republican side, the lone defection belonged to Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, who voted against the nominee. The reason was personal. Mullin had previously called Paul a "freaking snake," though he later apologized. Paul apparently found the apology insufficient. One of the 54 votes in favor, notably, came from Mullin himself.
Trump lauded his pick, saying Mullin "will make a spectacular Secretary of Homeland Security." He also highlighted Mullin's Native American roots, a biographical detail that adds texture to an administration frequently caricatured by its opponents.
The Department of Homeland Security is not a comfortable posting right now. Travelers have been enduring grueling waits due to TSA agents going without pay. ICE agents were deployed to several airports earlier on Monday to help curb the chaos. Senators remain at a standstill over a deal to fund the agency, though there was hope Monday evening that progress had been made. Senator Katie Britt told reporters after returning from the White House that there was a deal.
Meanwhile, recent clashes between ICE agents enforcing the administration's mass deportations policy and protesters resulted in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. The operational tempo is high. The political temperature is higher.
Mullin steps into all of it, replacing a secretary whose tenure ended in public spectacle. Noem faced scrutiny over her alleged affair with top staffer Corey Lewandowski, which both denied, and told Senator John Kennedy under oath that she had been given Trump's approval for a $220 million taxpayer-funded campaign designed to boost her national profile. Trump announced her exit on Truth Social.
Whatever Noem's troubles were, they belong to the past now. The question is whether Mullin can impose order on an agency that badly needs it.
Mullin's biography reads less like a senator's and more like a country song, minus the self-pity. He grew up on a farm in Westville, Oklahoma, where his family still resides. His name alone carries a story. As he told Roll Call:
"My father was the youngest boy of eight children, and he had two brothers who did not have any sons. And since I was the youngest of seven in my family, I was named after both of them."
He attended Missouri Valley College on a wrestling scholarship but dropped out at 20 when his father, Jim, fell ill. He and his wife Christie, married nearly 30 years with six children, including two adoptive twins, Ivy and Lynette, expanded the family business into the largest in the region and launched other successful companies. He also worked as a cow-calf rancher before entering politics.
Mullin went back to school in 2018 and earned an associate's degree in applied science in construction technology from Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology. He is the only senator without a bachelor's degree. In Washington, where credentials are worshipped and competence is optional, that distinction says more about the institution than about him.
He represented Oklahoma in the House from 2013 to 2023 before moving to the Senate.
Then there is the part of Mullin's biography that the Beltway press cannot stop writing about. He had a brief stint as a mixed martial arts fighter, leaving in 2012 with an undefeated 5-0 record. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2016.
That fighting instinct surfaced memorably during a 2023 Senate hearing, when Mullin challenged Teamsters president Sean O'Brien to a brawl. O'Brien had taken to X before the hearing to call Mullin a "clown" and a "fraud." The exchange escalated in real time:
"This is the time, this is the place, you want to run your mouth, we can be consenting adults, we can finish it here."
O'Brien replied that he'd love to. Mullin told him to stand up. It took Bernie Sanders, of all people, to intervene, admonishing Mullin to sit down.
"You're a United States Senator, sit down."
It was not Mullin's most senatorial moment. But something is clarifying about a man who doesn't hide behind press releases when he's angry. The question now is whether that directness translates into the executive competence DHS desperately needs.
Mullin's confirmation came despite a multi-year ethics investigation that resulted in him paying back $40,000 that a committee determined had been "mistakenly paid to him." The committee acknowledged he had made a "good faith effort" to resolve the matter. It is the kind of thing opponents will cite, and supporters will shrug at. Forty thousand dollars in the context of federal spending barely qualifies as a rounding error.
Mullin inherits the most politically charged cabinet department in the federal government. Immigration enforcement, airport security, agency funding, and a workforce stretched thin across every mission set. The left will treat every enforcement action as an atrocity. The right expects results.
He is a rancher, a business owner, a fighter, and now the man responsible for securing the homeland. The Senate gave him the job. The country will grade him on what he does with it.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco seized over 650,000 ballots from California's November 2025 special election this weekend and announced his office will conduct its own count, setting up a confrontation with the state's top law enforcement and election officials.
The investigation centers on Proposition 50, the special election measure seeking to reform California's congressional districts. Bianco's move came after the Riverside Election Integrity Team flagged roughly 45,000 excess votes in the county's results. California's secretary of state and attorney general want him to stop. He isn't stopping.
According to Fox News, at a Friday press conference, Bianco framed the investigation in terms Sacramento apparently finds threatening: simplicity.
"This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded."
That's the kind of sentence that shouldn't alarm anyone who believes elections are conducted honestly. You count the ballots. You compare the number to what was reported. If they match, everyone moves on. If they don't, you have a problem worth investigating.
But California's political establishment treated the probe like a five-alarm fire. Attorney General Bob Bonta's office sent multiple letters ordering Bianco to cease the investigation, according to the Desert Sun. Secretary of State Shirley Weber told City News Service that the sheriff's office "has taken actions based on allegations that lack credible evidence and risk undermining public confidence in our elections."
Weber then offered a line that tells you everything about how Sacramento views election oversight from outside its own clubhouse:
"The sheriff's assertion that his deputies know how to count is admirable. The fact remains that he and his deputies are not elections officials, and they do not have expertise in election administration."
Read that again. The secretary of state's response to a law enforcement investigation into ballot discrepancies is to mock the investigators' ability to count. Not to welcome transparency. Not to offer cooperation. Mockery.
Bonta's office told Fox News Digital on Sunday that it had tried to work with the sheriff's office, framing its posture as cooperative and reasonable:
"We have attempted to work cooperatively with the Sheriff's Office in order to better understand the basis for their investigation, including by reviewing the warrants themselves and by requesting the Sheriff's complete investigative file."
The office added that these requests were made "pursuant to the Attorney General's supervisory authority over county sheriffs." In other words, we outrank you; hand it over.
When Bianco didn't comply on their terms, the tone shifted. Bonta's office accused the sheriff of delay and obstruction:
"During this time, the Sheriff has delayed, stonewalled, and otherwise refused to work with us in good faith. To date, the Sheriff has failed to provide most of the requested documentation. But, what we have been able to learn raises serious questions about the merits of this investigation. We are especially concerned with legal deficiencies in the affidavits underlying the warrants, including the omission of material facts."
So the attorney general's office hasn't seen the full file, admits it doesn't have most of the documentation, but has already concluded the investigation lacks merit. That's not oversight. That's a verdict issued before the evidence is reviewed.
The Riverside Election Integrity Team identified what it described as roughly 45,000 excess votes in the county's November election results. Riverside elections official Art Tinoco rejected the team's findings earlier this month, telling county supervisors that initial intake logs by polling workers are meant to be estimates rather than exact tallies. Tinoco said the final tally was within 0.16%, or 103 votes, of the original estimate.
If Tinoco is right, a physical count would confirm that quickly and put the matter to rest. The question is why state officials are fighting so hard to prevent that confirmation from happening.
Bianco, a Republican candidate for California governor, clearly has no interest in backing down. He accused Bonta of intervening in the investigation and has clashed on social media with Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat also running for governor. The political dimensions are obvious to everyone. But the presence of political stakes doesn't negate the legitimacy of the underlying question: do the ballots match the reported totals?
Consider the pattern. An outside group flags a significant discrepancy. A local elections official says the numbers are actually fine, just estimates. A sheriff with legal authority to investigate says he'll verify that claim by counting the physical ballots. And the state's attorney general and secretary of state respond not by welcoming the transparency, but by:
If the election results are clean, a recount proves it. If they're not, the public deserves to know. Either way, the instinct to suppress an investigation rather than let it run its course tells voters something that no press release from Sacramento can undo.
Bianco captured the dynamic at his Friday press conference, directing particular fire at Bonta:
"The outrage that an investigation was happening was extremely concerning to me, especially coming from someone who claims to be a law enforcement officer that is, I've said this a minimum of a thousand times, he's an embarrassment to law enforcement."
Proposition 50 was designed to reshape California's congressional districts. The stakes are not abstract. If the ballot count matches the reported totals, Bianco will have spent political capital on a fight that ends in validation of the system. If it doesn't match, California has a crisis that extends well beyond Riverside County.
Sacramento is betting everything on the assumption that the sheriff will find nothing. If they're so confident, they should welcome the count.
They aren't welcoming it. That's the story.
Rep. Eric Swalwell abandoned his lawsuit against Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte on Friday, ending a legal fight the California Democrat launched in November after Pulte forwarded a criminal referral regarding Swalwell's mortgage to the Department of Justice.
The congressman had accused Pulte of abusing his authority by making the referral and asked the courts to demand that Pulte withdraw it. Now, without fanfare, the suit is gone.
The referral itself, however, is not.
Swalwell is not the only prominent Democrat to find himself on the wrong end of a mortgage fraud referral since Trump returned to office last year. Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James have faced criminal referrals in connection with mortgage fraud as well. Pulte also sent a similar referral to the Justice Department last year for Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook, as The Hill reports.
Lawyers for Swalwell claimed that Pulte searched for "the private mortgage records of several prominent Democrats," framing the referrals as politically motivated. They described Swalwell as "one of the president's most vocal and visible critics in Congress."
That framing is instructive. The argument isn't that the underlying facts are wrong. The argument is that Swalwell shouldn't be scrutinized because he's a political opponent of the president. If a Republican were under a mortgage fraud referral, the question from every newsroom in America would be simple: Did you commit fraud? When it's a Democrat, the question somehow becomes: why are you being investigated?
The Government Accountability Office said in December that it was investigating Pulte over the mortgage referrals following a request from Senate Democrats. So the response to potential fraud isn't to examine the fraud. It's to investigate the person who flagged it.
Swalwell is running for governor of California, which raises a separate and equally interesting question: Does he actually live there?
Conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert tried to have Swalwell removed from the November ballot in California over his residency, claiming the congressman does not live in the state and is therefore ineligible to run. Swalwell is listed, along with his wife, as a resident of Livermore, California. But Tom Steyer's general counsel put it more bluntly, stating that Swalwell "appears to live in California on paper only."
Steyer's campaign filed a petition to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber to enforce a dormant residency requirement in the race. A letter to Weber obtained by Politico warned that the issue could have consequences beyond the campaign trail:
"The Trump Administration could question Swalwell's legitimacy as Governor and, therefore, imperil California's receipt of federal funds, the state's ability to deploy the California National Guard, and act in emergencies."
When even a billionaire Democratic rival is raising the residency alarm, the "far-right conspiracy" defense starts to look thin. And yet that is precisely where Swalwell's campaign went, claiming Gilbert's challenge "has sunk to a new low, peddling far-right MAGA conspiracy theorist Joel Gilbert's tired talking points."
Note the tactic. Don't address whether you live in California. Attack the person asking the question. When Tom Steyer's own campaign raises the same concern, you simply pretend it isn't happening.
Swalwell filed this lawsuit with great public energy, positioning himself as a brave critic standing up to a weaponized federal agency. It was good campaign material for a gubernatorial run built on anti-Trump theatrics.
But lawsuits have discovery. Lawsuits have records. Lawsuits require you to open books you might prefer to stay closed. And now the lawsuit is gone.
The criminal referral to the Department of Justice remains. The residency questions remain. The pattern of several prominent Democrats facing mortgage fraud scrutiny remains. What doesn't remain is Swalwell's willingness to fight this out in a courtroom where the rules favor evidence over press releases.
If the referral was baseless and the lawsuit was righteous, dropping it makes no sense. If the referral touched something real and the lawsuit risked exposing more than it shielded, dropping it makes perfect sense.
Swalwell chose the exit. The question is what he's walking away from.
President Trump put the speculation to rest on Friday: Tulsi Gabbard isn't going anywhere.
Breitbart reported that while speaking before the House Intelligence Committee, Trump confirmed that his Director of National Intelligence still has his confidence. When reporters pressed him on whether Gabbard's position was "still safe," he didn't hedge.
"I thought she did a good job yesterday."
The brief statement carried more weight than its five words might suggest. It landed after a week in which Gabbard delivered back-to-back testimony before both chambers' intelligence committees, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center resigned, and online rumors about Gabbard's imminent departure gained traction.
Gabbard's week started on Wednesday with testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where she shared the intelligence community's assessments on Operation Epic Fury, China, and drug cartels. On Thursday, she appeared before the House Intelligence Committee alongside CIA Director John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Kash Patel.
The substance of her testimony was serious and wide-ranging. On national defense, she laid out the threat landscape in terms that left little room for ambiguity:
"The intelligence community assesses that Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan have been researching and developing an array of novel, advanced, or traditional missile delivery systems with nuclear and conventional payloads that put our Homeland within range."
She also addressed the spread of radical Islamist ideologies, calling it something that "poses a fundamental threat to freedom and foundational principles that underpin western civilization" and noting "increasing examples of this in various European countries."
That's not the testimony of someone phoning it in. Those are assessments that reflect a DNI doing her job: identifying the threats that matter and communicating them to the congressional committees tasked with oversight.
The backdrop to Trump's endorsement was a swirl of speculation that Gabbard was on her way out. Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned from his position days earlier because he opposed the war against Iran. That departure created an opening for the rumor machine to spin up.
Conservative investigative journalist Laura Loomer fueled the fire with a post on X claiming that Gabbard's "political staff expect that she is about to RESIGN, following the resignation" of Kent. Loomer went further, criticizing Gabbard's congressional testimony:
"This comes after two days of her testimony in front of Congress this week where she never once expressed support for President Trump or his decisions."
Loomer added that Gabbard "used her time during the hearings to affirm President Trump's right to make decisions as President of the United States, making it clear she doesn't support those decisions."
There's a distinction worth drawing here. Affirming the president's constitutional authority to make decisions is not the same thing as opposing those decisions. The DNI's role is to provide intelligence assessments to policymakers.
It is not to serve as a cheerleader during congressional testimony. The intelligence community's credibility depends on its ability to present facts and analysis without political coloring. That's what Gabbard appears to have done.
There's a persistent confusion in political commentary about what loyalty looks like in a cabinet-level intelligence role. Loyalty to the president doesn't mean every sentence begins and ends with a public declaration of support. It means executing the mission the president appointed you to carry out.
Gabbard walked into two separate committee hearings and delivered assessments on:
That's a full plate, and it tracks with every major national security priority the administration has identified. A DNI who turns her testimony into a rally speech does more damage to the president's agenda than one who presents hard intelligence with professional credibility. The former invites dismissal. The latter builds the evidentiary case that justifies the administration's policy decisions.
Trump clearly sees it that way. He wasn't asked a complicated question, and he didn't give a complicated answer. She did a good job. Her position is safe.
Washington's appetite for personnel drama is bottomless. Every resignation, every sideways glance in a hearing room, every anonymous staffer whispering to a journalist becomes evidence that the next departure is imminent.
Sometimes the rumors are right. More often, they're projections from people who want a particular outcome and work backward to find supporting evidence.
In this case, the man whose opinion actually determines whether Gabbard keeps her job weighed in directly. The speculation can continue in group chats and on social media. The president has spoken.
Gabbard spent her week briefing Congress on the threats that keep national security professionals awake at night. Trump spent five words confirming she'll keep doing it.
Lawyers for Brian Cole Jr., the man accused of planting two pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican national committee offices on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, filed a motion Monday claiming that President Trump's sweeping clemency covers their client's alleged conduct.
The argument is as ambitious as it is legally audacious. Cole's attorneys, Mario Williams and John Shoreman, contend that the "full, complete and unconditional pardon" Trump granted to those charged with offenses "related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021" encompasses Cole's charges. A White House official has already pushed back, telling The Hill the pardon "clearly does not cover this scenario."
Cole has pleaded not guilty. He maintains his innocence. He was arrested in December following what government officials described as an "aha moment" that led to a breakthrough in the nearly five-year investigation. A judge has ordered him to remain detained ahead of trial.
According to The Hill, Cole faces two serious federal charges: transporting an explosive device in interstate commerce, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years, and attempted malicious destruction by means of explosive materials, which carries a minimum of five years and a maximum of 20.
His attorneys framed their argument in Monday's motion with notable confidence:
"Brian Cole's conduct is so inextricably and demonstrably tethered to the 'events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021' that he must be pardoned pursuant to the applicable Presidential Pardon of January 20, 2025."
They added:
"The Pardon — like it or not — applies to Mr. Cole, based on the ordinary and plain meaning of the Pardon's language as applied to the relevant facts in this case."
The "like it or not" tells you the defense team knows exactly how this reads. They're betting that the pardon's plain text does more work than its political intent.
There's a meaningful distinction the defense is trying to blur. The Jan. 6 pardon was directed at participants in the Capitol riot: people who entered the building, clashed with police, or were charged with related offenses for their conduct that day. Planting pipe bombs outside party headquarters the night before is a different category of alleged conduct entirely.
A White House official underscored this by noting that the pipe bombs were placed on Jan. 5, not Jan. 6. The devices were discovered on the day of the riot, but the alleged criminal act occurred beforehand and targeted locations that are not the Capitol.
It's not yet clear whether Trump's far-reaching clemency applies to criminal counts brought after the proclamation was issued. That's a legitimate open legal question. But the factual question of whether planting explosives outside party offices constitutes conduct "at or near the United States Capitol" is a much harder sell.
This case is worth watching for reasons beyond the pardon question. The pipe bombs were one of the most alarming and least resolved elements of the entire Jan. 6 timeline. For nearly five years, the investigation produced no arrests. Then Cole was taken into custody. Whatever the "aha moment" was that cracked the case, prosecutors clearly believe they have their man.
Cole's defense strategy, however, reveals something broader about the legal landscape after the Jan. 6 pardons. When clemency is drafted broadly, creative defense attorneys will test the boundaries. That's not a flaw in the system; it's how the adversarial process works. A judge will now have to determine whether the pardon's text stretches as far as Cole's lawyers insist it does.
The smart money says it doesn't. The pardon language references events "at or near the United States Capitol." The DNC and RNC headquarters are neither. The conduct allegedly occurred the day before the riot, not during it. And the White House itself has said this isn't what the pardon was for.
But courts don't rule on smart money. They rule on text. And that's exactly the seam Cole's lawyers are trying to exploit.
Cole remains detained. His trial is ahead of him. The pardon motion will force a ruling that could clarify the outer limits of Trump's Jan. 6 clemency, which means this case now carries weight beyond one defendant.
If the motion fails, Cole faces the full force of federal explosives charges. If it somehow succeeds, it would redefine the scope of the pardon in ways nobody anticipated.
Either way, the man accused of planting bombs outside both parties' headquarters is now asking for mercy under a pardon designed for something else entirely. The court will decide whether the words on the page agree with him.
The FBI has opened a leak investigation into Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, over allegations that he improperly shared classified information. The probe, according to four people with direct knowledge of the investigation, predates Kent's departure and has been described as months-long.
Kent resigned on Tuesday in a public break with President Trump over the war in Iran. In his resignation letter, he accused the president of launching the conflict because of "pressure from Israel" and argued that Iran "posed no imminent threat to our nation."
After the resignation became public, Trump aides and allies denounced Kent as a leaker. The FBI investigation now lends weight to those characterizations.
Kent's departure was framed as a principled stand, and the media treated it accordingly. A senior intelligence official walking away from his post over a war makes for compelling television. It makes for even more compelling television when the resignation letter takes direct aim at the president and a key American ally.
But the timeline complicates that narrative. The FBI didn't open this investigation because Kent wrote a dramatic resignation letter. The probe was already underway. For months.
That distinction matters. A man under active federal investigation for mishandling classified material chose the moment of maximum media attention to cast himself as a whistleblower. The press, predictably, obliged. Kent became a courageous dissenter in the space of a news cycle, and the question of whether he had been improperly sharing classified information before his departure received far less oxygen.
The specific allegations remain thin on public detail, Semafor reported. Four sources confirmed the investigation's existence to Semafor, but the nature of the classified information Kent allegedly shared, and to whom he shared it, has not been disclosed. No charges have been filed. The investigation is ongoing.
What is clear: Kent held one of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. intelligence community. The National Counterterrorism Center sits at the nexus of signals intelligence, human intelligence, and interagency threat assessment. A director in that role has access to material that, if mishandled, could compromise sources, methods, and lives.
The seriousness of that access is precisely why the FBI investigates these matters. It is also why the media's eagerness to canonize Kent as a martyr deserves scrutiny.
Washington has seen this play before. A government official with access to sensitive information develops political objections to policy. Those objections find their way into sympathetic newsrooms. When the official eventually departs, the exit is staged as conscience-driven, and any subsequent investigation is framed as retaliation.
The sequence is almost liturgical at this point:
None of this means Kent is guilty. An investigation is not a conviction. But the reflexive media instinct to treat every anti-war resignation as inherently noble, while treating every federal investigation of the resigner as inherently political, reveals a bias so deep it functions as editorial policy.
If Kent improperly shared classified information, that is a federal crime regardless of how eloquently he wrote his resignation letter. The two questions are separate. The press should treat them that way.
The FBI investigation will proceed on its own timeline, indifferent to news cycles and resignation narratives. If the evidence supports charges, they will come. If it doesn't, the investigation will close, and Kent's defenders will claim vindication.
In the meantime, the political class will sort itself along predictable lines. Those sympathetic to Kent's opposition to the Iran conflict will frame the probe as retribution. Those who viewed his resignation as a betrayal of his position will point to the months-long investigation as proof that something was wrong long before Kent went public.
The facts, as they stand, are simple. A man entrusted with some of the nation's most guarded secrets is under investigation for allegedly sharing them improperly. He resigned in protest over a war. The investigation started before the resignation.
Conscience is not a security clearance. And a resignation letter, however well-written, does not immunize someone from the laws governing classified information.
The progressive left's bid to plant new "Squad" members in Congress collapsed across Illinois on Tuesday night, with far-left candidates losing in every contested Democratic primary where they challenged moderate or establishment opponents. Four districts, four defeats. The rout was comprehensive.
In Illinois' 9th district, left-wing influencer and journalist Kat Abughazaleh fell to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss. In the 8th, progressive candidate Junaid Ahmed lost to moderate former Rep. Melissa Bean. In the 2nd, progressive state Sen. Robert Peters came in a distant third. And in the 7th, CPC-backed labor leader Anthony Driver Jr. and progressive organizer Kina Collins finished third and fourth, respectively.
Not one insurgent broke through. Not one came close enough to claim a moral victory. Not one gave the Squad the reinforcements it desperately needed.
The marquee contest was Illinois' 9th, where Abughazaleh ran a conspicuously pro-Palestinian campaign against Biss. Axios noted that both candidates were opposed by AIPAC, which had backed pro-Israel state Sen. Laura Fine through its affiliate Elect Chicago Women, spending millions on her behalf.
Fine came in third anyway. AIPAC then pivoted in the final week, training its fire on Abughazaleh. The Chicago Progressive Partnership, meanwhile, ran ads boosting lower-tier leftist Bushra Amiwala, further fragmenting the progressive vote.
Biss, who carried endorsements from the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, won comfortably. AIPAC framed the outcome as a success despite its preferred candidate's third-place finish:
"While disappointed Laura Fine didn't prevail, the pro-Israel community is proud to have helped defeat would-be Squad members Kat Abughazaleh and Bushra Amiwala."
That's an interesting way to describe spending millions on a candidate who lost. But the bottom line is the same: the most aggressively left-wing candidate in the race went down.
The 8th district offered the clearest test of whether progressive infrastructure could manufacture a congressional seat. Junaid Ahmed had the full weight of the left behind him: Justice Democrats, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and a local DSA chapter. Melissa Bean had AIPAC, crypto, and AI-affiliated PACs.
Bean won.
Justice Democrats Executive Director Alexandra Rojas tried to spin the loss as someone else's failure:
"It took AIPAC, AI, and Crypto coming together to spend millions whitewashing Melissa Bean's right-wing record in Congress to elect a former Congresswoman."
She added that the result "is a massive loss for AIPAC as they lose more and more influence within the Democratic Party." A curious interpretation of an evening in which AIPAC's opponents went 0-for-4. Rojas also claimed Justice Democrats spent "very little" in these races, which is either an admission that they didn't think they could win or an explanation for why they didn't.
The other two races barely qualified as contests. In the 2nd district, progressive state Sen. Robert Peters finished a distant third behind both AIPAC-backed Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller and former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. In the 7th, state Rep. La Shawn Ford edged out AIPAC-backed Chicago Treasurer Melissa Conyears Ervin, while the progressive candidates, Driver and Collins, were afterthoughts.
The 7th is the one district where AIPAC's candidate also lost, but the progressive wing didn't benefit. Ford won on his own terms, without the Squad apparatus behind him.
Illinois was supposed to be fertile ground. Dozens of insurgent Democrats are running in congressional races across the country this cycle, and the Illinois primaries were an early bellwether. The results suggest the Squad's brand of politics, centering campaigns on opposition to Israel, progressive litmus tests, and social media energy, does not convert to votes even in deep-blue territory.
AIPAC was candid about what it saw:
"Life looks pretty good."
The organization said Illinois voters "rejected far-left, would-be Squad members who centered their campaigns on attacking Israel." That framing is self-serving, but it's not wrong.
For House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Tuesday was a welcome development. Jeffries is most popular among the moderate and mainstream liberal wings of the Democratic Party, and every Squad expansion complicates his leadership. Every Squad loss simplifies it.
The progressive post-mortem is already writing itself. Rojas previewed it:
"No amount of shell PACs or covert funding can hide their toxicity from Democratic voters."
This is the pattern. The far left runs candidates on ideology and online enthusiasm. The candidates lose. The far left blames dark money rather than examining whether voters actually want what they're selling. Then they run the same playbook in the next cycle, expecting different results.
At some point, "we were outspent" stops being an explanation and starts being an excuse. Especially when your candidate had endorsements from two U.S. senators, a national PAC, and a sprawling grassroots organization, and still couldn't close.
The Squad isn't growing. In Illinois, the Democratic electorate made that clear.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) fired off a joint letter to the Department of Justice on Monday, accusing former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of perjury during back-to-back congressional hearings earlier this month. The two top-ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees claim Noem made "demonstrably false statements" across four categories of testimony, and they want the DOJ to investigate.
The accusations carry serious legal language. Making false statements to Congress is a felony that can bring up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. But the letter itself reveals just how much political theater is baked into the entire exercise.
According to Fox News, Raskin and Durbin allege that Noem's testimony touched four areas that could constitute perjury:
The ad campaign drew the most heat. During her testimony, Noem stated that the contract went through a competitive process and that career officials at the Department chose who would handle the advertising. Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican, pressed her on that claim directly. Kennedy told Noem his own research showed the contracts were not competitively bid and called the situation "something we have to defend" as a member of the Appropriations Committee.
Kennedy also alleged that the group receiving most of the money had direct ties to former DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin and her husband, Benjamin Yoho, who runs the company in question. Yoho denied using his wife to secure contracts and wrote a letter to Senate Democrats on Friday demanding a correction and an apology.
"This statement is factually incorrect, and I respectfully request that you have your colleague correct the official record and issue an apology."
The contracting questions are legitimate. Kennedy's scrutiny proves that. But the Democratic letter wraps a real oversight question inside a criminal referral designed for maximum political damage, and the timing tells you everything.
Noem is already gone from DHS. President Trump announced earlier this month that she would no longer serve as secretary and would instead take on a new role as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas. Sen. Markwayne Mullin has been nominated to take over the department, with a confirmation hearing expected this week.
So Democrats are referring a former cabinet secretary for criminal investigation just as her replacement prepares for confirmation. The letter isn't about accountability. It's about headlines. Raskin and Durbin practically admit it. Their own letter concedes they have "low expectations" that the DOJ will pursue the matter, then pointedly notes that the statute of limitations for perjury is five years.
"While we have low expectations that you will pursue this matter given your partisan weaponization of the Department of Justice, we note that the statute of limitations for perjury and for knowingly and willfully making false statements to Congress is five years."
Read that again. They acknowledge the referral is likely going nowhere, then leave a breadcrumb for a future administration to pick up. This is not a serious criminal complaint. It is a political time capsule.
The strongest thread in the Democrats' letter involves the ad campaign contracting process. Noem said it was competitive. Kennedy's own research suggested otherwise. Those are facts worth investigating through normal oversight channels, not through a criminal referral sent to a DOJ that the referring members openly distrust.
Raskin and Durbin wrote that Noem's statements "appear to violate criminal statutes prohibiting perjury and knowingly making false statements to Congress." The word "appear" is doing enormous work in that sentence. Perjury requires proving that a witness knowingly and willfully lied, not that her testimony was imprecise or self-serving.
Even the letter's own language hedges on the most politically charged claim. On whether Trump knew about the ad campaign, Raskin and Durbin wrote:
"Even if Secretary Noem was the one telling the truth about the President's knowledge, and she may well have been, she flatly misrepresented that the contract had been subject to a competitive bid."
They concede she may have been truthful on one point while insisting she lied on another. That's not the structure of an airtight criminal case. That's the structure of a political document, trying to keep multiple attacks alive simultaneously.
DHS called the perjury accusations "categorically FALSE." Whether that blanket denial holds up under scrutiny is a separate question. But the broader pattern here is worth recognizing.
Congressional Democrats have spent years treating criminal referrals as press releases. The referral mechanism exists for genuine cases where lawmakers uncover evidence of serious wrongdoing that warrants prosecutorial review. When it becomes a routine partisan tool, deployed against political opponents with full knowledge that nothing will come of it, it degrades the institution, making the referral more than the person being referred.
The contracting questions around the $220 million ad campaign deserve answers. Kennedy proved that bipartisan oversight is possible when the questions are grounded in fiscal responsibility rather than political positioning. The appropriate venue for those answers is continued congressional oversight and inspector general review, not a criminal referral that its own authors admit is dead on arrival.
President Trump told NBC News on Saturday that Iran wants to end the conflict, but he's holding the line. The terms Tehran is offering aren't sufficient, and until they are, the United States has no intention of easing up.
"Iran wants to make a deal, and I don't want to make it because the terms aren't good enough yet."
The comments came as Operation Epic Fury headed into day 16, with Trump signaling that a full Iranian abandonment of nuclear ambitions would be central to any agreement. He also raised the possibility of additional strikes on Kharg Island, Iran's critical oil export hub, which U.S. forces hit with over 90 military targets on Friday.
"We totally demolished Kharg Island, but we may hit it a few more times just for fun."
Trump noted the United States had intentionally spared the island's energy infrastructure, a detail worth absorbing. The world's most powerful military leveled every military target on the island while threading the needle around oil facilities. That's not recklessness. That's precision with a message attached.
A Reuters report cited a senior White House official saying the administration had rebuffed efforts by Middle Eastern allies to launch ceasefire talks. Trump, the official said, is "not interested" in those discussions "right now" and intends to continue the mission "unabated."
This is the posture that decades of failed diplomacy with Iran demanded. The previous playbook was familiar, according to Breitbart: Tehran provokes, the international community convenes, a deal gets signed that Iran violates before the ink dries, and the cycle resets. Trump is refusing to enter that loop.
There's a reason the regime wants to talk. It's not because they've found religion in nonproliferation. It's because, as Trump put it in the interview, the damage is stacking up fast.
"We've knocked out most of their missiles. We've knocked out most of their drones. We knocked out their manufacturing of missiles and drones, largely. Within two days, it'll be totally decimated."
When a regime that has spent decades building proxy armies and missile arsenals suddenly discovers the virtues of negotiation, the correct response is not gratitude. It's leverage.
Trump also addressed what may be the most strategically significant piece of this conflict: the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world's oil normally passes.
On Truth Social earlier Saturday, the president said "many countries" would be sending warships alongside the United States to keep the strait "open and safe," naming:
He described these as "numerous countries that are affected by the thuggery of Iran." In the NBC interview, he added that these nations had not merely agreed but embraced the mission.
"They've not only committed, but they think it's a great idea."
Trump said the United States will be "sweeping the strait very strongly" but declined to discuss specific operational details on escorting ships through the waterway. That's the right call. You don't broadcast tactics to a regime that has spent years threatening to weaponize the chokepoint.
The coalition itself tells a story. When China, a nation that typically avoids anything resembling alignment with Washington, agrees to send warships to counter Iranian aggression, the regime's isolation is no longer theoretical. It's naval.
Perhaps the most striking moment of the interview came when Trump questioned the status of Iran's newly installed supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father, Ali Khamenei, after the elder ruler was killed in the opening phase of the operation.
"I don't know if he's even alive. So far, nobody's been able to show him."
Trump called reports of his death "a rumor" but did not dismiss them. The questions have intensified since Mojtaba Khamenei issued what was described as his first statement as the supreme leader without appearing on camera. No visual confirmation. No public appearance. Just words attributed to a man no one can verify is breathing.
"I'm hearing he's not alive, and if he is, he should do something very smart for his country, and that's surrender."
A regime that cannot produce its own leader on camera is not projecting strength. It is projecting exactly what it has become: a government that has spent its credibility, its arsenal, and possibly its leadership in the span of two weeks.
The pattern here is unmistakable. On Friday, Trump announced that U.S. forces had carried out what he described as "one of the most powerful bombing raids in the History of the Middle East" and "totally obliterated every MILITARY target" on Kharg Island. By Saturday, he was fielding questions about ceasefire talks and brushing them aside. When asked whether additional strikes on Kharg Island were possible, his answer was one word: "possible."
Every element of this, the military strikes, the coalition formation, the refusal to negotiate prematurely, the public questioning of Iran's leadership, works in concert. Trump is not simply prosecuting a military campaign. He is systematically dismantling the regime's ability to negotiate from anything other than desperation.
Iran has spent years banking on the assumption that American presidents would eventually come to the table because the alternative was too costly. That calculation no longer holds. The alternative arrived, and it brought warships from five continents.
Fifteen days in, and the regime can't show the world its own supreme leader. The terms aren't good enough yet. They shouldn't be.