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.
A federal judge ruled Saturday that Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty can sit in on Monday's Kennedy Center board meeting, receive documents about President Trump's plan to close the center for two years of renovations, and even speak her piece. What the judge did not do: force the board to let her vote.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper concluded that Beatty, an ex officio member through her position in Congress, is entitled to participate. But he drew the line at compelling a vote, finding she hadn't carried her burden on that front.
"The Court finds, however, that Beatty has not carried her burden as to her right to vote, at least at this very early stage."
Cooper added that the "marginal harm" to Beatty from not voting is limited since she can lodge objections on the record and attempt to persuade her colleagues. In other words, she gets the microphone but not the ballot. A distinction that tells you everything about the strength of her legal position, as CNBC reports.
Beatty sued to preclude the Trump administration from excluding her from Monday's session, where the board is expected to decide whether to approve the president's proposal to shutter the Kennedy Center on July 4 for a two-year renovation. She told reporters outside the courthouse that she went to court "to stand up for the rule of law and democracy."
Her lawyer, Nathaniel Zelinsky, framed the request as routine:
"We're not asking for something unusual. It's my friends on the other side you are asking you to deviate from the norm."
But let's be honest about what this lawsuit was really about. One Democratic congresswoman wanted to insert herself into a board decision she disagrees with. She got access, which is fine. She didn't get veto power, which is better.
During Thursday's arguments, Cooper pressed Justice Department lawyer William Jankowski on why Beatty hadn't been given details about the closure plan. "Why not just give her the information?" the judge asked. "How is the government harmed?" Jankowski responded that the information "should be provided to Beatty and other meeting participants by Monday," adding cryptically that "an action isn't final until it's final."
The Kennedy Center saga is one of the more interesting subplots of the second Trump term. During his first stint in office, Trump paid the institution little mind. Some honorees threatened to boycott if he participated, and he ended up skipping all four of the annual honors awards programs during that period. The relationship was, at best, indifferent.
This time around is a different story entirely. Since returning to the office in January 2025, Trump has shown a far higher level of interest than any recent president. Consider what he's done:
In December, the board voted to add Trump's name alongside Kennedy's on the building's exterior. It was done the following day.
On Friday, Trump announced that Richard Grenell, the ally he appointed as the center's president, will step down and be succeeded by Matt Floca, who manages the Kennedy Center's facilities operations. That transition is expected to be finalized at Monday's meeting.
Trump has complained about the building's appearance, and the complaints aren't without basis. The building has fallen on hard times. Numerous artists have canceled performances. Attendance has dropped off. A $257 million renovation commitment isn't the act of someone trying to destroy a cultural institution. It's the act of someone trying to save one that the people who claim to love it have allowed to deteriorate.
That's the part Beatty and her allies would rather not discuss. They want to frame this as an assault on the arts. What it looks like, from the outside, is a president who secured a quarter-billion dollars in funding, installed competent leadership, and proposed a renovation plan to restore a building that needs it.
Beatty told reporters: "I want to know where your money, our money, is going." A fair question in the abstract. But she's an ex officio member of a board that has a chairman, appointed leadership, and congressional funding already in place. Her lawsuit wasn't about transparency. If it were, she'd have been satisfied with the judge's order granting her access to documents and a seat at the table.
She wanted a vote. The court said no.
Monday's meeting will proceed. Beatty will be in the room. She'll have her documents, her speaking time, and her objections on the record. What she won't have is the power to block a renovation that Congress already funded.
Sometimes a seat at the table is exactly what it sounds like: a chair.
The National Endowment for the Humanities has terminated two grants totaling $120,000 that funded research on LGBTQ cartoonists and "multiethnic graphic literature," according to a report from The College Fix. Both grants, each worth $60,000, were awarded in the final weeks of the Biden administration and axed in April 2025 as part of a broader overhaul of how the agency distributes taxpayer money.
The first grant went to University of Florida English professor Margaret Alice Galvan for a book titled "Comics in Movement," which, according to its own description, examines how LGBTQ+ cartoonists "innovated comics through grassroots formats in the 1980s-90s."
The second went to San José State University assistant professor Maite Urcaregui for "Seeing Citizenship: Picturing Political Belonging in Multiethnic Graphic Literature."
Neither researcher nor the NEH itself responded to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
The project descriptions tell you everything you need to know about where priorities sat at the NEH before the current administration stepped in.
Galvan's grant description frames LGBTQ+ cartoonists of the 1980s and '90s as documenting life "in a moment when the community was facing government neglect of the HIV/AIDS crisis and disregard for their civil liberties," adding that "their comics have been largely forgotten." The grant, in other words, existed to resurrect niche activist art and repackage it as scholarship worthy of federal funding, as Fox News reports.
Urcaregui's project was, if anything, more steeped in the academic jargon that has become a dialect unto itself. She planned to:
"Analyze 20th- and 21st-century graphic literature by Asian American, African American, Arab American, and Latinx authors alongside contemporaneous visual archives and critical legal histories to underscore how these texts reveal and critique citizenship's inconsistencies, inequalities, and exclusions."
Read that sentence twice and ask yourself what concrete knowledge it produces for the American public. The answer, for most taxpayers, is nothing. It is ideology dressed in academic syntax, funded with money taken from people who never asked for it and would never have approved it.
These two grants were not isolated casualties. The Washington Post reported on April 7, 2025, that the NEH canceled over 1,200 grants following staffing and funding reductions tied to federal cost-cutting efforts. The scale of the cancellations signals something larger than a line-item dispute. It reflects a fundamental reassessment of what the humanities endowment is for.
The NEH confirmed to The College Fix that the timeline was straightforward:
"Both grants were awarded at the end of 2024, under the Biden administration, and terminated in April 2025."
The Biden administration, in its closing months, seeded these grants into the system the way outgoing tenants leave furniture bolted to the floor. The current administration simply unbolted it.
On April 24, the NEH posted an announcement outlining its new direction. The agency said it had taken:
"Programmatic steps to ensure that all future awards will, among other things, be merit-based, awarded to projects that do not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender, and that help to instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country."
Merit-based. No extreme ideologies. Grounded in founding principles. These are not radical propositions. They are the baseline standards that should have governed the NEH from the beginning.
Not everyone agreed the cleanup should proceed unimpeded. In July, Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction pausing the cancellation of certain NEH grants, citing First Amendment concerns.
The legal challenge is worth watching but not worth overstating. Preliminary injunctions are temporary measures, not final rulings. They reflect a judge's initial assessment that plaintiffs might succeed on the merits, nothing more. The core question of whether taxpayers are constitutionally obligated to fund academic projects that promote race and gender ideology remains very much open.
And that question deserves an honest answer. The First Amendment protects your right to write about LGBTQ cartoonists or "multiethnic graphic literature" on your own time and your own dime. It does not guarantee you $60,000 from the federal treasury to do so. There is a vast difference between censorship and defunding, and the left has spent decades deliberately blurring that line.
For years, agencies like the NEH operated as a quiet conveyor belt for progressive academic priorities. Grants flowed to projects built on frameworks of identity, grievance, and deconstruction. The language was always dense enough to discourage scrutiny.
The dollar amounts were always small enough to avoid headlines. And the cumulative effect was an entire federal infrastructure dedicated to subsidizing a worldview that most Americans never voted for and would reject if they read the grant descriptions aloud at a town hall.
That is what makes these two grants instructive. They are not large. They are not dramatic. They are ordinary. They represent the thousands of small funding decisions that, taken together, amount to the federal government choosing sides in a cultural argument and billing the public for it.
The grants still appear on the NEH website, a small irony. But the money behind them is gone, and the agency's stated direction is clear. Future funding will be tied to merit and national purpose, not to the priorities of an academic establishment that long ago stopped asking whether its work served anyone outside the faculty lounge.
Sixty thousand dollars for a book about forgotten activist cartoons. Sixty thousand more for a study on how graphic novels "reveal and critique citizenship's inconsistencies." The Biden administration thought that was a good use of your money. The current administration disagreed.
That is not censorship. That is accountability.
President Donald Trump torched California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Truth Social Wednesday night, calling the Democrat's recent public remarks "perhaps the most self-destructive interview I've ever seen" and declaring his 2028 presidential ambitions dead on arrival.
The target of Trump's post: a weekend stop in Atlanta, where Newsom, promoting his forthcoming memoir, attempted to connect with a predominantly Black audience by emphasizing his own academic shortcomings. A short clip of those remarks circulated widely on social media and drew sharp criticism from across the political spectrum.
Trump did not mince words.
"In one fell swoop, he took himself out of even being considered as the Presidential Nominee of the Crazy Democrats."
He added that Newsom had described himself as "dumb, had low Boards, can't read, has dyslexia, and has a mental disorder," calling the performance "a politically suicidal act" and concluding flatly: "He is no longer a viable Presidential Candidate!"
During the Atlanta event, Newsom leaned into self-deprecation in a way that clearly was meant to read as humility. Speaking to an audience that included Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, the governor offered this, according to Newsmax:
"I'm not trying to impress you, I'm just trying to impress upon you, I'm like you. I'm not better than you. I'm a 960 SAT guy."
He went further, telling the crowd that they had never seen him read a speech "because I cannot read a speech." He later defended the remarks by referencing his lifelong struggle with dyslexia, saying his mother "didn't want my dyslexia to hold me back."
The defense might have landed differently if the audience were, say, a dyslexia advocacy group. Instead, Newsom chose to tell a room full of Black Americans that the way to prove he's "like you" is to announce he can barely read and scored a 960 on his SATs.
According to 2024 College Board data cited by the New York Post, the average SAT score for Black students is 907 out of 1,600, compared with 1,083 for white students. Newsom's self-reported 960 sits just above the Black student average and well below the white student average.
He chose that number. He chose that audience. The implication wasn't subtle.
Sen. Ted Cruz captured the dynamic in four words, writing on X that Newsom's remarks represented the "soft bigotry of low expectations." Rep. Randy Fine of Florida called them "disgusting." Even rapper Nicki Minaj weighed in, noting that Newsom's apparent strategy for bonding with Black people "is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can't read."
When you've lost Nicki Minaj, you've lost the room.
Newsom has been working to build a national profile ahead of a potential 2028 presidential run. The memoir tour, the out-of-state stops, the carefully curated relatability: all of it points toward a man who sees himself as the future of the Democratic Party. Atlanta wasn't a random stop. It was a signal.
But the signal he sent was not the one he intended. Instead of projecting the kind of aspirational competence that voters look for in a presidential candidate, Newsom chose to lead with weakness. He told a national audience that he can't read a speech. He bragged about a mediocre test score. He framed his own limitations as the connective tissue between himself and a Black audience, which says far more about how Newsom sees that audience than it does about his humility.
This is the core contradiction of the modern Democratic approach to minority voters. The party claims to champion Black excellence while its leaders repeatedly signal that the way to connect with Black Americans is to lower the bar. Newsom didn't walk into that room and talk about achievement, entrepreneurship, or opportunity. He walked in and said: I'm not very smart either.
Democrats have run this playbook for decades, and it's wearing thin. Black voters increasingly recognize the difference between a politician who respects them and one who performs relatability like a costume. Newsom's Atlanta moment was the costume slipping.
Newsom later posted a longer clip of the exchange on X, attempting to reframe the remarks around his dyslexia diagnosis. The pivot is understandable. Dyslexia is a real challenge, and there's nothing wrong with discussing it openly.
But context matters. Newsom didn't open up about dyslexia at a health conference or an education summit. He dropped it in the middle of a political performance designed to make a Black audience in a key Democratic city feel like he's one of them. The dyslexia defense doesn't erase the calculation that preceded it.
If anything, it raises a harder question for Democrats weighing their 2028 options. A candidate who generates this kind of bipartisan backlash during a book tour isn't going to fare better under the relentless pressure of a presidential primary. The self-inflicted wounds don't get smaller on a bigger stage. They get bigger.
Trump saw the opening and took it. So did Cruz, Fine, and Minaj. Newsom handed everyone of them the ammunition and then acted surprised when they fired.
Jeremy Carl, President Trump's nominee for assistant secretary of state for international organizations, withdrew his candidacy on Tuesday after weeks of scrutiny over past remarks about American culture and white identity. The withdrawal came not because Democrats had the votes to block him, but because not every Republican on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was willing to back him against unified Democratic opposition.
That distinction matters.
Carl needed unanimous GOP support on the committee to overcome what he described as the "unanimous opposition of Senate Democrats." He didn't get it. And so a nominee with the full backing of both the President and Secretary Rubio walked away from a post he was qualified to fill.
Carl announced his withdrawal on X, expressing gratitude to Trump for both the original nomination and the renomination that followed after the first expired:
"I wanted to announce that I am withdrawing my nomination for consideration as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. I am tremendously grateful to President Trump for nominating me and then (upon expiration of my original nomination) renominating me for this role, and I am also grateful to Secretary Rubio and his team for their continued support throughout this long and time-consuming process."
He was blunt about what killed his confirmation:
"Unfortunately, for senior positions such as this one, the support of the President and Secretary of State is very important but not sufficient. We also needed the unanimous support of every GOP Senator on the Committee on Foreign Relations, given the unanimous opposition of Senate Democrats to my candidacy, and unfortunately, at this time this unanimous support was not forthcoming."
So the President wanted him. The Secretary of State wanted him. And a handful of Republican senators, facing the prospect of a political fight, decided they didn't want the hassle.
The controversy centered on Carl's past use of the phrase "white culture," which Democrats treated as a confession of racial supremacism rather than what Carl explained it to be. During his February confirmation hearing, Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy pressed Carl to explain what values he believed were disappearing and how "white culture" was being erased in America.
Carl's answer was straightforward. He described "white culture" as referring to a shared American civic culture, specifically the cultural traditions shared by most Americans before the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act. He argued that people of all backgrounds can participate in that culture. Whether you agree with his framing or find it clumsy, it is a recognizable argument about assimilation and civic identity. It is not white supremacy.
But nuance is not the currency of confirmation hearings. The phrase was extracted, weaponized, and deployed.
According to The Daily Caller, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Carl of holding "a long history of racist, white supremacist, and antisemitic views." The accusation arrived the same day Carl withdrew, functioning less as an argument and more as a branding exercise. Attach the words "racist" and "white supremacist" to a nominee's name often enough, and the political math shifts, even among allies.
Carl recognized the tactic for what it was, firing back at Schumer directly:
"You appear to only disavow racism, antisemitism and racial supremacy if you think you can use those words as a cudgel to beat Republicans, which is why you haven't denounced the anti-White racist comments of Texas Democrat House leader Gene Wu or Democrat Congresswoman and U.S. Senate candidate Jasmine 'The only people that are crying are the mediocre White boys' Crockett."
The point Carl raises deserves more than a news cycle. Schumer frames himself as a guardian against racial extremism, yet Democratic officials who make openly racial remarks about white Americans face no calls for accountability from their own leadership. Jasmine Crockett, a sitting congresswoman and Senate candidate, publicly declared that "the only people that are crying are the mediocre White boys." Gene Wu's comments were apparently inflammatory enough for Carl to cite them. Neither generated a Schumer press conference.
This is not about keeping score on who said what. It is about whether the standard is consistent or whether "racism" is simply a word reserved for one side of the aisle.
Democrats did exactly what Democrats do. They found a phrase, stripped it of context, and turned it into a weapon. That is not surprising. It is not even interesting anymore. It is simply the process by which the left polices the boundaries of acceptable thought.
The more troubling question is why Republican senators on the Foreign Relations Committee couldn't hold the line for a nominee their own president selected twice and their own secretary of state publicly supported. Carl's remarks were defensible. His qualifications were apparently not in question. The only thing standing between him and confirmation was political discomfort.
Every time a Republican senator flinches at a Democratic attack line, it validates the tactic. It tells Schumer and his caucus that the "racist" label still works, that it can still peel off enough GOP votes to sink a nominee without a single substantive policy objection being raised. The incentive structure is simple: if the smear works, they will keep using it.
This is not the first time a conservative nominee has been torpedoed not by Democratic votes but by Republican hesitation. The confirmation process has become a credentialing system in which the left determines which conservative thinkers are acceptable for government service. Anyone who has written, spoken, or published outside the narrow band of approved discourse becomes a liability rather than an asset.
The result is a slow but steady filtering of the talent pool. Bold thinkers get replaced by safe ones. People who have actually engaged with the most contentious cultural debates of the era are deemed too controversial to serve, while the debates themselves rage on without them.
Carl wrote about American identity and assimilation. He argued that a shared civic culture was dissolving. Whether his language was optimal is a matter of taste. Whether his underlying observation is wrong is a matter no senator bothered to seriously contest.
Trump will nominate someone else for the post. That person will likely have a thinner paper trail and fewer interesting things to say about the state of American culture. The position will eventually be filled. The machinery moves on.
But the lesson lingers. If you want to serve in government, don't write books. Don't use phrases that can be clipped out of context. Don't engage with the questions that actually matter. Play it safe, say nothing memorable, and wait your turn.
That is the confirmation culture the Senate has built. Jeremy Carl just learned what it costs to have said something worth attacking.
President Trump has been asking pointed questions about whether longtime adviser Corey Lewandowski personally profited from a $220 million federal advertising campaign that featured now-ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to three people familiar with his conversations.
The president, according to a senior White House official, has raised the subject repeatedly.
"He's mentioned the ads several times."
The questioning comes on the heels of Noem's removal from DHS and her reassignment to a special envoy role within the newly formed "Shield of the Americas." That decision followed a pair of contentious Capitol Hill hearings last week that put the ad campaign, and the contracting apparatus behind it, squarely in the spotlight.
Trump told NBC News he "wasn't thrilled" about Noem's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee and said he "didn't know anything about it." The ads. The contracts. The $220 million price tag.
Lewandowski, who has served as a special government employee at DHS for more than a year and functioned as a de facto chief of staff to Noem, categorically denied receiving any money from DHS contracts, NBC News reported. Asked how much he made, he answered plainly.
"Zero, not one penny."
He told NBC News in a Monday interview that Trump had not raised the ads or contracts with him directly, despite speaking with the president on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the week before Noem was fired. That's three conversations in three days with no mention of a $220 million campaign that the president was simultaneously grilling other aides about.
Lewandowski framed the situation as a matter of personal trust built over more than a decade.
"Since I've known the guy for 11 years, I think it's fair to say if he had a concern about something I was doing, he would raise it."
Maybe. But a second senior White House official offered a blunter read of the situation, telling reporters that "Corey made out on that one."
Two Democratic senators, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Peter Welch of Vermont, have launched an investigation into three businesses that won DHS contracts to produce the ads:
The Strategy Group is run by Ben Yoho, described as the husband of former DHS spokeswoman Tricia McGlaughlin. The senators cited news reports, including a November ProPublica story, detailing ties between the ad contracts and firms connected to Noem's orbit. Their letters asked the businesses to provide documentation of their DHS agreements, which companies they subcontracted, and whether any of them had deals in place with Lewandowski.
No-bid contracts totaling $220 million would raise eyebrows in any administration. In one that has built its mandate on eliminating government waste and draining the bureaucratic swamp, they raise something closer to alarm bells.
Noem's tenure at DHS was dogged by more than just the ad controversy. She had to fend off reports about her acquisition of a luxury jet, tensions with agencies within her own department, and broader contracting problems. During her Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, she told lawmakers that Trump had signed off on the expensive ad campaign. That claim did not help her cause with a president who said he "didn't know anything about it."
Meanwhile, DHS officials and lobbyists have said Lewandowski wielded outsized influence in the awarding of federal contracts at the department, though specifics remain thin. What isn't thin is the trail of dysfunction. In February, Trump switched up the team overseeing DHS's Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis after federal agents shot and killed two American citizens.
The president has consistently praised Noem for helping cut off the southern border with Mexico. But praise for results doesn't grant immunity from accountability for spending. Conservatives who cheered the administration's border enforcement posture have every reason to demand that the money behind it was spent honestly.
Lewandowski, who was the first manager on Trump's original presidential campaign and later had a dust-up with 2024 campaign manager Susie Wiles (now the White House chief of staff), says it is his own decision whether he leaves DHS when Noem departs. He pointed to March 31 as a potential exit date but said he has not made up his mind.
That ambiguity is telling. A man with nothing to hide and no political exposure would have a clear answer. Instead, Lewandowski is hedging on his own future while insisting the president harbors no concerns about his past conduct.
Trump's instinct here is the right one. When $220 million in taxpayer money flows through no-bid contracts to firms connected to political allies, the person at the top should be asking hard questions. The fact that he's asking them about someone in his own orbit, rather than waiting for Democrats to build the narrative, is exactly the kind of accountability that draining the swamp requires.
The answers just need to arrive before March 31.