A 43-year-old Southern California woman who slashed her boyfriend's throat and buried his body in what police called a "makeshift tomb" in her backyard has been sentenced to 15 years in prison. The corpse stayed there for eight years before anyone found it.
Trista Spicer was sentenced Friday in San Bernardino Superior Court after a jury late last year found her guilty of second-degree murder in the October 2014 killing of her boyfriend, Eric Mercado, 42. The San Bernardino Sheriff's Department is holding Spicer in the county jail until her expected transfer to a California state prison.
According to news outlets, the killing began after Mercado complained about the dinner Spicer served him. What followed was not a momentary act of panic.
Spicer testified during the trial that she struck Mercado in the head several times with a cast-iron skillet. She then stabbed him in the neck with a kitchen knife he had dropped after she struck him with the skillet. The sequence matters. This was not a single blow in a struggle. It was repeated blunt force trauma followed by a fatal stabbing.
What came next reveals something colder than the killing itself. Spicer enlisted a friend to help her wrap the corpse in a deflated air mattress. She then concealed the body in her backyard, where it remained undiscovered while Mercado's family searched for answers. His family had reported him missing since 2014, as Breitbart reports.
For eight years, a family grieved a disappearance that was never a disappearance at all.
The case broke open in 2022, and the circumstances of its unraveling are as jarring as the crime itself. According to the San Bernardino Sun, Spicer told her boyfriend at the time that she needed to remove Mercado's corpse because her family wanted to sell the house. Not guilt. Not confession. Real estate logistics.
Police acted on a search warrant of the property and discovered what they described as a makeshift tomb on the grounds. After eight years buried in a backyard, Mercado's remains finally told the story his family had been desperate to hear.
Mercado's sister, Mahira Torres, addressed the court during Friday's proceedings and called Spicer "evil." Her victim impact statement carried the weight of nearly a decade of not knowing.
"You took my brother's life, and you shattered ours."
There is no rebuttal to that. There is no mitigating context that erases what Torres and her family endured: years of searching, years of wondering, while the woman responsible for their brother's death walked free and lived in the same house where she had buried him.
Spicer testified that Mercado had a history of physically and verbally abusing her, and that he often made her sit naked for long periods as part of his punishing and controlling behavior. This was her defense. The jury weighed it.
They returned a verdict of second-degree murder.
Domestic abuse is real, and its toll on victims is serious. But a jury heard the full testimony, evaluated the evidence, and concluded that what happened in October 2014 was murder. The post-killing conduct tells its own story. A person acting in genuine self-defense does not typically enlist help to wrap a body in a deflated air mattress, bury it in the backyard, and maintain silence for eight years while the victim's family files missing persons reports.
Concealment is not the behavior of someone who believes they had no other choice. It is the behavior of someone who believes they could avoid consequences.
Fifteen years for taking a life and hiding it for nearly a decade. Torres called Spicer evil. The justice system called it second-degree murder. Whether 15 years adequately accounts for the killing itself, plus the calculated concealment, plus the years of anguish inflicted on a family left searching, is a question the sentence invites but does not answer.
Eric Mercado's family spent eight years looking for a man who was buried a few feet from where his killer slept. They deserve better than closure. They deserved the truth in 2014. They got it in 2022 because someone wanted to sell a house.
ActBlue, the Democratic Party's fundraising backbone, may have given Congress a misleading account of how it screens out illegal foreign donations, and its own attorneys knew it, according to internal legal memos now surfacing through a New York Times investigation published Thursday.
The memos, drafted by ActBlue's outside law firm Covington & Burling, warned that CEO Regina Wallace-Jones' 2023 letter to congressional investigators described safeguards that were not consistently followed. One memo went further, raising the prospect of a criminal investigation if prosecutors concluded ActBlue had tried to conceal the truth about foreign contributions flowing through its platform.
For a nonprofit that functions as the central clearinghouse for Democratic campaign cash, the implications are serious. Federal election law bars foreign nationals from donating to American political campaigns. When Wallace-Jones told Congress in 2023 that ActBlue had a "multi-layered vetting framework" to catch illegal foreign money, she was speaking under the kind of scrutiny where accuracy is not optional, it is a legal obligation.
Wallace-Jones wrote to Congress in 2023 in response to concerns about ActBlue's ability to vet donors overseas. She told lawmakers the platform processed contributions with foreign mailing addresses only when the donor supplied a U.S. passport number. She also said ActBlue would contact donors to request passport information and return any money when the donor could not be reached.
That account painted a picture of tight controls. But Fox News Digital reported that the New York Times reviewed internal memos, resignation letters, and other communications showing those procedures were not fully accurate, and not consistently happening.
Covington & Burling's attorneys flagged the gap between what Wallace-Jones told Congress and what was actually occurring inside the organization. The Washington Examiner reported that donors using third-party payment platforms such as Apple Pay, PayPal, and Venmo were not required by ActBlue to provide documentation showing they were legally permitted to donate to U.S. political committees.
That is not a minor technical oversight. It is a hole in the vetting system large enough to let foreign money walk through.
The internal memos from Covington & Burling did not mince words. One memo, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon, stated plainly:
"It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections."
The same memo warned that because ActBlue's staff knew the system was not as robust as necessary, any violations could be characterized as "knowing and willful", a legal standard that increases the penalties the Federal Election Commission might seek and gives the Justice Department jurisdiction for a potential criminal investigation.
Another passage addressed the November 2023 letter to Congress directly:
"An aggressive prosecutor may view the November 2023 letter not just as a false statement but as an effort to conceal the foreign contributions."
That language, "effort to conceal", is the kind of framing that separates a sloppy mistake from potential obstruction. It came not from Republican investigators or conservative critics, but from the law firm ActBlue had hired to protect it.
The pattern of officials making claims to Congress that later prove questionable has become a recurring theme in Washington. Democrats have been eager to push criminal referrals over alleged false congressional testimony when the target is a Republican. Whether they apply the same standard to their own fundraising apparatus remains to be seen.
A spokesperson for Covington & Burling told Fox News Digital: "We have complete confidence in the legal advice our lawyers provided to ActBlue." That statement is carefully worded. It expresses confidence in the advice given, not in ActBlue's compliance with it.
The New York Times reported that Covington's relationship with ActBlue was ultimately severed. The Times also reviewed resignation letters and interviewed ActBlue employees on the basis of anonymity, suggesting internal turmoil that went beyond a routine legal disagreement.
When your own law firm warns you that your statements to Congress may be viewed as concealment, and then the firm walks away, the situation has moved well past "misunderstanding."
ActBlue was already the target of several congressional probes led by Republican House committees before the Times report landed. Newsmax reported that several former ActBlue officials invoked their Fifth Amendment rights during closed-door testimony before those committees, a legal right, but one that rarely inspires public confidence.
The New York Times reported that three investigations by GOP-led House committees remain ongoing. Trump called on the Justice Department last year to investigate ActBlue over concerns the platform was allowing straw donations and foreign contributions barred by federal election law. Early in his term, he directed the DOJ to return a report within 180 days on the status of its findings.
That report, the Times noted, has never been made public.
House Republican committee chairmen Bryan Steil, James Comer, and Jim Jordan responded to the Times findings directly. The New York Post reported their joint statement:
"The New York Times' bombshell report raises serious questions about whether ActBlue's CEO intentionally misled Congress."
GOP investigators also said ActBlue relaxed its fraud-prevention policies twice during the 2024 campaign cycle and did not require CVV entry for card transactions until January 2024. Internal documents reportedly indicated some overseas prepaid-card transactions were flagged.
The question of what officials tell Congress under oath, and what happens when those statements prove false, has generated intense debate in recent months. Democrats have called for special counsel investigations over testimony disputes involving Republican officials. The standard they set should apply here, too.
In May, ActBlue issued a press release addressing the scrutiny. The organization called it a "myth" that its platform allows foreign nationals to illegally contribute donations and described its new measures:
"While ActBlue has always had strong measures in place that have successfully prevented illegal foreign donations, beginning in 2025 we have gone even further. We now require that Americans living abroad be physically present in the United States to make a contribution on our platform, despite campaign finance laws allowing citizens to contribute to campaigns while living abroad."
Read that carefully. ActBlue says it has "always had strong measures." Its own attorneys said those measures were not robust enough and that staff knew it. ActBlue says it went "even further" in 2025. But the congressional letter in question was sent in November 2023, and the vetting gaps existed during the 2024 election cycle, the most expensive in American history.
The timing matters. If ActBlue's safeguards were inadequate during the very cycle when billions of dollars flowed through its platform, the 2025 reforms do not retroactively fix the problem. They confirm one existed.
ActBlue did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment in time for publication.
Federal prosecutors have shown increasing willingness to pursue evidence from congressional proceedings when they suspect misconduct tied to major political controversies. Whether that appetite extends to the Democratic Party's fundraising machine is a test of institutional evenhandedness.
Several questions hang over this story. The DOJ report Trump requested within 180 days has not surfaced publicly. The specific findings of the three ongoing House investigations have not been disclosed. And the full scope of foreign money that may have entered Democratic coffers through ActBlue's platform remains unknown.
The Breitbart report on the Times findings noted that Covington & Burling concluded Wallace-Jones' 2023 letter described screening steps that were not always followed in practice, and that one memo raised the possibility of a criminal investigation if prosecutors believed facts had been concealed.
Congressional testimony carries weight precisely because it carries consequences. When officials volunteer to testify before House committees, they do so knowing that false statements can trigger real legal exposure. Wallace-Jones did not volunteer; she responded to an investigation. The bar for accuracy was no lower.
ActBlue processed donations for virtually every major Democratic candidate and cause in the country. If its vetting system had holes, and its own lawyers said it did, then the integrity of an entire fundraising ecosystem is in question. The people who deserve answers are not partisan operatives. They are American voters and donors who trusted that the system was lawful.
When your own attorneys warn you in writing that prosecutors could view your letter to Congress as concealment, the word "myth" stops being a defense. It starts sounding like a habit.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth called Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George on Thursday and asked for his immediate retirement. George complied. Just like that, the Army's top uniformed officer and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was out.
Chief spokesperson Sean Parnell confirmed the move in a statement on X:
"General Randy A. George will be retiring from his position as the 41st Chief of Staff of the Army effective immediately. The Department of War is grateful for General George's decades of service to our nation. We wish him well in his retirement."
Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the Army's vice chief of staff, will serve as acting chief.
A senior War Department official offered a blunt explanation: "It was time for a leadership change in the Army." An Army official told Fox News that Hegseth did not give George any reason for asking him to step down. No drawn-out negotiation. No transition period. Immediate.
According to Fox News, George was nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate in 2023. He was expected to serve a four-year term through roughly 2027. Before that, he served as senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin from 2021 to 2022.
That résumé tells you everything you need to know about the institutional culture George came up in. The Biden Pentagon prioritized DEI initiatives, climate directives, and ideological litmus tests over combat readiness and lethality. The generals who thrived in that environment were selected for a reason. They were comfortable managing a military that had drifted from its core mission.
None of this means George lacked personal bravery or professional accomplishment over a long career. It means the leadership philosophy he represented was installed by an administration whose military priorities often had little to do with warfighting.
George's departure is not an isolated event. It is the latest in a systematic effort by Hegseth to reshape the Pentagon's senior ranks. Consider the scope:
That last point reportedly created tension with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who refused the directive to pull those officers from the list. The White House reviews senior military promotion lists before they are sent to the Senate, and Hegseth has clearly signaled that the old rubber-stamp process is over.
The source material notes that the U.S. military remains engaged in combat with Iran. Leadership transitions during active operations always carry weight. That reality makes the decision more striking, not less defensible. If anything, it underscores the urgency. You don't wait for a convenient moment to install the leaders you believe the moment demands.
For years, conservatives have watched the senior military establishment calcify into a culture that rewarded bureaucratic navigation over battlefield instinct. Officers who could speak fluently about equity frameworks rose while those who questioned the institutional drift were sidelined. The promotions pipeline became a conveyor belt for a very particular kind of general: one who could manage Washington as comfortably as a theater of operations, and who often preferred the former.
Hegseth is dismantling that conveyor belt. Whether any individual removal is fair to the officer involved is a separate question from whether the institution needed the shock. Both things can be true simultaneously.
George has made no public statement. Hegseth offered no public reason. The Army official's confirmation that no explanation was given during the call itself is notable. In Washington, the absence of justification is often treated as an outrage. In the military, the commander's authority to relieve subordinates is foundational. The War Secretary exercised that authority. The general accepted it.
Critics will frame this as chaotic, impulsive, or destabilizing. They framed every previous removal the same way. The pattern they should be noticing is different: a civilian leadership structure reasserting control over a military bureaucracy that had grown comfortable operating as its own constituency.
LaNeve steps in as acting chief. The permanent replacement will signal where Hegseth wants to take the Army's culture and posture. That appointment will matter more than the departure it follows.
The Pentagon shakeup is not slowing down. Every new removal reinforces the same message to every general and admiral still wearing stars: your position exists to serve the elected civilian leadership's vision for national defense, not to preserve the institutional preferences of the last administration.
That used to be an uncontroversial principle. The fact that it now registers as radical tells you how far the institution had drifted.
A federal judge in Boston ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration unlawfully terminated the parole status of migrants who entered the country through the CBP One app, ordering the government to reverse its revocation of their legal status. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs found that the Department of Homeland Security failed to follow its own regulations when it moved to strip parole from thousands of migrants last year.
DHS called the ruling "blatant judicial activism."
The case centers on a mobile application expanded by the Biden administration starting in 2023, which allowed migrants to schedule appointments at the border and, in many cases, receive parole into the United States for up to two years. When President Donald Trump returned to the White House, he moved to shut down the app. In April of last year, DHS sent mass emails to many of the roughly 900,000 people who had entered the country using it, informing them it was "time for you to leave the United States."
A class-action lawsuit followed in August, filed by three individuals from Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti, along with the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts and the legal group Democracy Forward.
According to Fox News, Judge Burroughs's ruling hinged on procedural grounds, finding that DHS exceeded its statutory authority and contradicted its own regulatory framework when it terminated parole en masse. In her opinion, she wrote:
"The regulations do not give the agency unfettered discretion to terminate parole."
She further found that the termination notices failed to comply with the requirements outlined in both statute and DHS's own regulations:
"When Defendants terminated the impacted noncitizens' parole without observing the process mandated by statute and by their own regulations, they took action that was 'not in accordance with law.'"
This is where conservatives should pay close attention, not to the outcome, but to the architecture of the problem. The Biden administration used parole authority, a tool designed for case-by-case humanitarian exceptions, and scaled it into a de facto admissions program for nearly a million people. That decision created a legal structure that now constrains what the current administration can do to unwind it. You build a bureaucratic edifice, and suddenly a judge tells you the demolition permit wasn't filed correctly.
The Trump administration argued, correctly, that Biden overstepped parole authority by broadly awarding the status instead of granting it on a case-by-case basis, which is what the law actually requires. That argument didn't carry the day in this courtroom, but it remains the central issue.
Parole was never meant to be an assembly line. The Immigration and Nationality Act envisions it as a narrow, individualized tool. The Biden administration turned it into a conveyor belt, processing hundreds of thousands of migrants through an app and paroling them into the country with minimal scrutiny. That was the original lawlessness. The fact that a federal judge is now protecting the fruits of that lawlessness on procedural grounds doesn't make the underlying program any less of a perversion of statutory intent.
Consider the sequence:
The pattern is familiar. A Democratic administration uses executive authority to create facts on the ground, embedding hundreds of thousands of people into the immigration system. Then, when a Republican administration attempts to course-correct, the judiciary steps in to police the process of the correction while having shown no similar interest in policing the process of the original overreach.
Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, the progressive legal group behind the lawsuit, framed the ruling in sweeping terms:
"Today's ruling is a clear rejection of an administration that has tried to erase lawful status for hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button."
The irony is thick enough to cut. The "lawful status" Perryman celebrates was itself created with something very close to the click of a button: a mobile app that transformed parole from a narrow exception into a mass-entry program. If clicking a button to grant parole to 900,000 people is legitimate governance, clicking a button to revoke it is just the next administration using the same tools.
The Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts said the ruling "brings long-awaited relief after months of fear and uncertainty." That human dimension is real. People made decisions based on the status the government granted them. But the appropriate target for frustration is the administration that handed out a temporary status it lacked clear authority to grant at that scale, not the one trying to restore the law's actual boundaries.
DHS made clear it views the ruling as an overreach, with a spokesperson insisting that canceling the paroles "is a promise kept to the American people to secure our borders and protect our national security." The spokesperson also argued the ruling interfered with the president's authority to determine who remains in the country.
An appeal is the obvious next step. The procedural nature of the ruling suggests the administration could also attempt to re-terminate the paroles through a process that satisfies the court's requirements, providing individualized determinations rather than mass revocations.
But the broader lesson is one conservatives have been shouting about for years. When an administration uses executive power to create massive, quasi-legal immigration programs outside the normal legislative process, unwinding them becomes a legal minefield. Every person paroled becomes a plaintiff. Every mass action becomes a procedural vulnerability. The bureaucracy that was built to let people in becomes a fortress against letting the next president enforce the actual law.
Biden's DHS built the trap. The courts are now enforcing their walls.
President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday, tightening the rules around mail-in voting, directing federal agencies to build state-by-state citizenship verification lists that will determine who receives an absentee ballot ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The order is straightforward in its mechanics: only voters confirmed as citizens will be mailed ballots. Ballots will arrive in secure envelopes with barcodes to track them. The Department of Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, will create the voter lists. The Department of Justice will investigate any wrongdoing in mail-in ballot distribution.
States that disobey the order may lose federal funds.
Trump signed the order during an Oval Office ceremony, framing it in terms that cut to the core of the issue.
"We want to have honest voting in our country, because if you don't have honest voting, you can't have, really, a nation if you want to know the truth."
According to the New York Post, the executive order requires a list to be created in each state of citizens who are eligible to vote. Absentee ballots will only be sent to those on the approved list. Trump has directed DHS to establish a system to compile and transmit the "state citizenship list" within 90 days, which puts the deadline at the end of June.
That timeline matters. Midterm primary elections are already underway in many states, and Election Day is November 3. The administration is moving to get the infrastructure in place well before voters head to the polls.
The concept is not radical. It is, in fact, the bare minimum of what election administration should look like: verify that the person receiving a ballot is a citizen, and track the ballot to ensure it arrives where it's supposed to. The fact that this requires an executive order tells you everything about how degraded the system has become.
Trump has pushed heavily for the Save America Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote in federal elections. He has said he is in favor of the act.
But the legislation remains stuck in a legislative logjam on Capitol Hill. The executive order functions as a parallel track, achieving through administrative action what Congress has failed to deliver through legislation. It targets the specific vulnerability of mail-in voting rather than the broader registration system, but the principle is the same: if you aren't a citizen, you don't get to participate in choosing American leaders.
This is not a controversial proposition anywhere outside Washington. Every other serious democracy on the planet manages to verify voter identity. The resistance to doing so in the United States has always been more revealing than the arguments against it.
Mail-in voting, by design, removes the voter from any point of human verification. No poll worker is checking an ID. There is no signature compared in real time. There is a ballot, an envelope, and a mailbox. The opportunities for error, and for something worse than error, multiply at every step of that chain.
A long-standing vocal critic of mail-in voting, Trump has consistently identified this as a structural weakness in the system. The executive order addresses it not by eliminating mail-in voting but by imposing verification requirements that should have existed from the start.
Citizenship lists built from DHS and Social Security Administration records represent the most reliable data the federal government has. Cross-referencing those databases to confirm that a ballot recipient is actually an American citizen is not suppression. It is competence.
The mail-in voting reforms are all but certain to face legal challenge in the courts. That much is predictable. Every election integrity measure of the last decade has been met with litigation from groups that treat verification as an obstacle rather than a safeguard.
The arguments write themselves: claims of disenfranchisement, allegations of disparate impact, procedural objections to executive authority. The playbook hasn't changed. But the legal landscape has shifted, and the administration clearly built this order with court battles in mind.
Trump himself seemed unbothered by the prospect, expressing confidence in the durability of the order.
"I believe it's foolproof, and maybe it'll be tested. Maybe it won't."
Watch how opponents of this order frame their objections. They will not say they oppose verifying citizenship. They will say the process is too burdensome, the timeline too tight, the databases too imperfect. They will argue around the principle because they cannot argue against it.
No serious person believes that non-citizens should vote in American elections. But a remarkable number of serious people have spent years building a system where it is functionally impossible to confirm that they don't. Every proposal to close that gap meets the same wall of procedural outrage.
The executive order forces a simple question into the open: if you oppose verifying that mail-in ballots go only to citizens, what exactly are you protecting?
Midterm Election Day is November 3. The clock is running. The lists are being built.
Sen. Cory Booker went on national television Sunday and said what most Democratic voters already suspect: his party has no answer for the moment the country is living through. The New Jersey Democrat told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the Democratic Party "has failed this moment" and called for generational renewal at the top, a remarkable public rebuke from a sitting senator who is simultaneously running for reelection and refusing to rule out a 2028 presidential bid.
The admission landed with the weight of the obvious. Booker is not some backbencher freelancing on cable news. He is a two-term senator from a blue state, a former presidential candidate, and a man promoting a new book. When he tells a national audience that his own party has failed, it is worth asking: failed at what, exactly? And who, exactly, is responsible?
The Hill reported that Booker made the comments during an exchange with NBC anchor Kristen Welker, who pressed him on whether Democrats are shrinking their own coalition with ideological purity tests. Booker did not dodge the question. He conceded the point and went further.
"I'm proud of so many things that my Democratic colleagues are doing. But as a whole, our party has failed this moment. It's why I've called for new leadership in America."
That is not a minor quibble about messaging or tactics. It is a senator telling his own voters that the institution they keep sending money to and pulling the lever for has come up short when it mattered most.
Booker framed the failure in broad terms, arguing that partisan tribalism, not any single policy dispute, is the core disease. He called for what he described as "generational renewal," a phrase that carries obvious implications for the aging Democratic leadership class that has held power in Washington for decades.
As Breitbart reported, Booker argued that Democrats risk shrinking their coalition through purity tests and said the country needs a more unifying vision, a direct shot at the progressive wing that has policed ideological conformity within the party for years.
The senator did not name names. But the target was plain enough. The Democratic Party's current leadership structure has presided over repeated electoral losses, internal fractures, and a base that increasingly demands ideological lockstep on issues from immigration to energy to gender policy. Booker wants voters to believe he represents something different.
This is not the first time a prominent Democrat has broken ranks to demand a generational changing of the guard. Even Barack Obama has urged the party to "pass the torch" as its aging leaders face growing restlessness from younger challengers.
"I've called for a generational renewal because this left-right divide is killing our country. And our adversaries know it. They come onto our social media and try to whip up hate in America. That is one of our biggest crises."
Notice the pivot. Booker acknowledges the party's failure, then quickly shifts blame outward, to foreign adversaries, to social media, to unnamed forces stoking division. It is a familiar move. Admit the problem, then locate the cause anywhere but inside the institution you just criticized.
Perhaps the most revealing moment came when Booker tried to reframe the Democratic narrative away from its near-total fixation on opposing the current administration. He told Welker that the challenges facing the country extend well beyond any single president.
"Because the challenges on the horizon aren't just this current crisis that Trump has caused. He shouldn't be the main character of our narrative right now. We have real challenges from new technologies like AI and robotics, new challenges that we need more unity in our country and a reminder that we are not each other's enemies."
For a party that has built its entire brand around resistance to one man, that is a striking concession. Booker is essentially telling Democrats that their strategy of making every election a referendum on Trump has left them without a governing vision of their own. He is right about that, even if his proposed alternative, vague appeals to unity and common ground, sounds more like a book tour than a policy platform.
The deeper problem Booker cannot quite bring himself to name is that the Democratic coalition is fracturing along multiple fault lines simultaneously. Left-wing insurgents have swept contested primaries in states like Illinois, pushing the party further from the center even as figures like Booker call for broader appeal.
Booker added a line that read more like a campaign bumper sticker than a governing philosophy.
"In fact, our ability to find common ground has always been our greatest hope."
Common ground is a fine aspiration. But it is hard to square with a party that has spent years enforcing the very purity tests Booker now criticizes, excommunicating members who break with progressive orthodoxy on crime, immigration, or cultural issues.
Welker gave Booker the opening every ambitious senator dreams about: the presidential question. Booker played it exactly the way candidates-in-waiting always do.
"I am definitely not ruling it out. I'm running for reelection. I hope New Jersey will support me for another six years."
"Definitely not ruling it out" is Washington code for "I'm already thinking about it." Booker ran for president once before, in the 2020 cycle, and dropped out before the Iowa caucuses. His candidacy never gained traction with the base, and there is little evidence that the political landscape has shifted in his favor since then.
But the timing of these comments, a new book, a Sunday morning interview, a public critique of his own party's leadership, suggests Booker is laying groundwork. Whether Democratic primary voters in 2028 will want a candidate whose central pitch is "we failed and I'm the answer" remains an open question.
The internal reckoning Booker is calling for is not new. Obama strategist David Plouffe has said Democrats still haven't reckoned with their 2024 losses, a pattern of avoidance that stretches back years. Every cycle, a few brave voices inside the party say the coalition is too narrow, the message too insular, the leadership too old. And every cycle, the same leadership class survives.
For all his talk of failure, Booker never identified a single policy position he would change. He did not say Democrats were wrong on immigration enforcement. He did not say the party's embrace of soft-on-crime prosecutors cost them credibility. He did not say the push to reshape American energy policy alienated working-class voters. He said the party needs "new moral imagination." That is not a policy. It is a slogan.
The senator also did not explain why, if the party has truly failed this moment, he continues to seek reelection under its banner. He wants credit for the critique without bearing any cost for the failure he describes. That is a comfortable position for a man promoting a book and testing the presidential waters.
Conservative voters watching this unfold can be forgiven for a certain skepticism. Democrats periodically discover the virtues of unity, common ground, and big-tent politics, usually right after they lose an election. The question is never whether they can diagnose the problem. It is whether they can stop doing the things that caused it.
Booker says his party has failed the moment. On that much, at least, he and the voters who sent his party packing seem to agree. What he hasn't explained is why anyone should trust the same institution to get it right next time.
Graham Platner, the 41-year-old Democratic Senate hopeful in Maine who built his insurgent brand on attacking the "Epstein Elite," received a $20,000 grant from a family foundation whose board member appears in recently released Department of Justice files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Platner, who is running in the Democratic primary against Governor Janet Mills for a shot at incumbent Republican Susan Collins, took the grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in 2021 to fund an oyster farm he operated, according to an article from the Maine Small Business Development Centers.
The foundation currently lists Spyros Niarchos as a board member. Spyros Niarchos has been described by Greek newspaper Documento as a member of the "inner circle" of Jeffrey Epstein. He appeared in several of the DOJ files released in recent months.
That's a problem for a candidate whose entire pitch involves pointing fingers at the powerful for their proximity to Epstein.
Platner targeted Collins specifically for not voting to release the Epstein files, the Daily Mail reported. He accused her of "protecting pedophiles and abusers" and publicly asked, "whose bidding is she doing?"
Strong words from a man whose oyster farm was bankrolled by the family of someone who shows up in those very files.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation was established after the death of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos I in 1996. The family's entanglements with Epstein, however, extend well beyond a foundation letterhead. The shipping mogul's grandson, Stavros Niarchos III, was also named in the files and co-hosted a 2013 Halloween party to which Epstein was invited. Niarchos III, who has dated Paris Hilton and is now married to Dasha Zhukova, the ex-wife of former Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, occupies the kind of rarefied social orbit where Epstein thrived.
The released files paint a picture of Spyros Niarchos's proximity to Epstein that goes beyond casual acquaintance. In a January 2018 conversation between Epstein and a redacted individual, Epstein asked about Niarchos:
"Is there a new boy?"
The redacted person replied that there was "an older man" and added, "You will be proud of me." Epstein called Niarchos "very interesting" and noted they "shared a mutual friend in the 80s," whom he described as a "beautiful Venezuelan girl."
By April 2018, the exchanges grew more disturbing. Epstein emailed a redacted person with a request:
"I need a girls with great task to help decorators. Help dinners, and flowers design etc the island. HELP."
The redacted person responded by asking what nationality and age Epstein wanted, adding: "I am in Saint Moritz with Spyros now!" Epstein's answer: "up to 30 years."
The appearance of an individual's name in the files is not necessarily evidence of wrongdoing. But when a candidate builds his entire campaign on Epstein accountability, the standard he set for others applies to him, too.
The Niarchos Foundation grant is not the first headache for the Platner campaign. It may not even be the biggest one. Last year, a video surfaced showing Platner with what was identified as a Nazi SS symbol tattooed on his chest, reportedly obtained during a drunken visit to a tattoo parlor in Split, Croatia, in 2007. Platner released a statement last fall insisting he was unaware of the symbol's meaning:
"I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that – and to insinuate that I did is disgusting. I already had the tattoo covered with a new design."
He later showed off the replacement tattoo in a video posted on X, describing it as "a Celtic knot with some imagery around dogs, because my wife Amy and I, love dogs."
Then there's the Reddit history. Platner has come under fire for posts in which he reportedly asked why "black people don't tip" and suggested that women who are raped in the Army should be careful about how much they drink. On the latter, Platner told local station WGME:
"I made that comment in 2013. I had just come out of the infantry, which was, at the time, all male. I rarely interacted professionally with women in the service."
The explanation is almost more revealing than the original comment. The defense amounts to: I said something indefensible about sexual assault victims because I hadn't spent enough time around women. Platner's campaign dismissed the controversies as politically motivated, timed to coincide with establishment competition entering the race.
"[My donors] know that this is all nonsense. It is no surprise that these stories dropped within days of DC's chosen candidate getting into this race."
Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who favors Governor Mills in the primary, had avoided a public endorsement until after the tattoo story broke. Then he declared Mills "the best candidate to replace Susan Collins." Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, endorsed Platner to "fight oligarchy."
The Democratic primary in Maine has become a microcosm of the party's broader identity crisis:
Platner drew crowds of 500 in Ellsworth and 200 in Caribou. He clearly has an audience. But audiences don't survive the kind of compounding scrutiny that comes from Nazi tattoo stories, Reddit posts about race and sexual assault, and financial ties to the family of an Epstein associate, all landing in the same campaign cycle.
The core issue here isn't the $20,000. It's the hypocrisy. Platner positioned himself as the candidate brave enough to name names and demand accountability for anyone who brushed against Epstein's world. He attacked Susan Collins for insufficient zeal on the Epstein files. He branded himself the anti-establishment warrior who would expose the "Epstein Elite."
The records showed that the foundation of an Epstein associate's family funded his business. His campaign has not provided a public response, and neither has the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
The left loves to construct moral hierarchies. They decide who gets to lecture, who gets to accuse, and who must answer. Platner wanted to be the one asking the questions. Now the questions are pointed at him, and the silence is conspicuous.
When you make Epstein your campaign issue, you don't get to dismiss your own Epstein-adjacent funding as "nonsense." You opened that door. You walked through it with cameras rolling and righteous indignation blazing. You don't get to close it behind you now.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on April 1 in Trump v. Barbara, the case that will almost certainly determine whether President Trump's executive order redefining birthright citizenship passes constitutional muster. A decision is expected by late June.
Nearly 15 months after President Trump signed Executive Order No. 14,160 on his first day back in office, the legal battle over its meaning has finally reached the merits stage. No more procedural detours. No more jurisdictional sideshows. The Court will confront the question head-on: Does the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee automatic citizenship to every child born on American soil, regardless of whether their parents are here legally?
The answer will reshape American immigration law for a generation.
The executive order, titled "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship," targets two specific categories. First, children born to mothers who are illegally present in the United States when the father is not a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Second, children born to mothers whose presence is "lawful but temporary," such as those on tourist or student visas, when the father likewise holds no permanent status, as National Constitution Center reports.
The legal resistance was almost instantaneous. On Jan. 21, 2025, one day after the order was signed, Washington state and three other states hauled the administration into court. A district court issued a temporary universal injunction blocking the order, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld it. That sequence surprised no one.
In Trump v. CASA (2025), a divided Supreme Court stepped in but only to rule that the district court lacked the authority to issue a universal injunction. It declined to address the underlying constitutional question. On the same day, a group of individuals, led by a plaintiff under the pseudonym "Barbara," sued the federal government in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire. That court approved a class of potentially affected individuals and issued its own injunction.
The Trump administration submitted a petition for a writ of certiorari on Sept. 26, 2025. The justices granted it on Dec. 5, agreeing to decide "whether the Executive Order complies on its face with the Citizenship Clause and with 8 U.S.C. 1401(a), which codifies that Clause."
That is as clean a question as the Court could have framed. And it is long overdue.
The Citizenship Clause reads:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
For decades, the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" has been treated as a formality, a constitutional afterthought with no independent force. The prevailing assumption, hardened by repetition rather than rigorous analysis, has been that physical birth on U.S. soil is the only requirement. The executive order challenges that assumption directly.
The amendment was ratified in the aftermath of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the decision that held Black Americans had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The Citizenship Clause was designed to guarantee that formerly enslaved people and their children would never again be denied membership in the political community. That purpose is beyond dispute.
What is very much in dispute is whether the framers of that clause intended it to confer citizenship on the children of people who entered the country in violation of its laws, or who are present only temporarily and owe no lasting allegiance to the United States.
United States Solicitor D. John Sauer anchors the administration's argument in two Supreme Court precedents, both written by the same justice: Horace Gray.
The first is Elk v. Wilkins (1884). John Elk, a Winnebago Native American, was born on a reservation but moved to Omaha, where he was employed and paid taxes. He was not allowed to vote. On appeal, Elk cited Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Gray, writing for the majority, ruled that Elk was:
"No more 'born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,' within the meaning of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, than the children of subjects of any foreign government born within the domain of that government, or the children born within the United States of ambassadors or other public ministers of foreign nations."
Gray also wrote that the amendment was designed to place "beyond doubt that all persons, white or black, and whether formerly slaves or not, born or naturalized in the United States, and owing no allegiance to any alien power, should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside."
That phrase, "owing no allegiance to any alien power," does significant work for the administration's position. Illegal immigrants and temporary visitors, by definition, retain allegiance to their home countries. Sauer argues that their children therefore "do not qualify" for citizenship "because their parents are not domiciled in, and thus do not owe the requisite allegiance to, the United States."
The second case is United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which opponents of the executive order treat as dispositive. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to parents who were both Chinese citizens, and the Court held that he automatically became a United States citizen at birth. But Sauer reads Wong Kim Ark narrowly, characterizing it as establishing a "general rule of citizenship by birth in the territory for children of persons 'domiciled within the United States.'" Wong Kim Ark's parents were legal, long-term residents. They were domiciled. The case, the administration argues, does not extend to illegal immigrants or short-term visitors.
The American Civil Liberties Union, representing opponents of the order, takes the opposite reading. Their argument centers on Wong Kim Ark as a sweeping affirmation of common law jus soli, the principle that birth on the soil equals citizenship, full stop.
The ACLU contends:
"Wong Kim Ark's basic holding is that the Clause enshrines the preexisting common law of citizenship. Under the common law—including the dominant American decision of the era, Lynch v. Clarke, (N.Y. Ch. Ct. 1844)—the rule was citizenship by birth, regardless of parental nationality or immigration status. Domicile was irrelevant."
They further argue that "even temporary visitors are 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States," citing Justice Gray's reference to The Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon (1812).
Notice the sleight of hand. The ACLU collapses criminal jurisdiction, the power to arrest and prosecute someone on your soil, into political allegiance. Every person physically present in the United States is subject to its criminal laws. That has never been contested. The question is whether that kind of jurisdiction is the same as the jurisdiction contemplated by the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment when they wrote "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Justice Gray himself, in Elk v. Wilkins, clearly distinguished between the two. His own rulings suggest the answer is no.
The legal debate is intricate, but the policy reality is simple. Under the current interpretation, any person who crosses the border illegally and gives birth on American soil produces an American citizen. That child then becomes an anchor for future chain migration claims. The incentive structure is obvious, and it has operated unchallenged for decades, not because the constitutional text demands it, but because no administration had the nerve to test the question.
This administration did.
The justices now face a choice between two readings of the same clause, written by the same justice, in two different cases decided 14 years apart. Elk v. Wilkins suggests "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" carries real substantive weight, excluding those who owe allegiance elsewhere. Wong Kim Ark is either a broad endorsement of birthright citizenship for everyone born on U.S. soil, or a narrower ruling limited to the children of domiciled legal residents.
The ACLU wants the Court to read Wong Kim Ark as broadly as possible and Elk v. Wilkins as narrowly as possible. The administration asks the Court to read them together, as a coherent body of law from the same jurist.
One approach requires ignoring half of Justice Gray's jurisprudence. The other requires taking all of it seriously.
By late June, we will know which path the Court chose.
Corey Lewandowski, the Trump 2016 campaign manager who embedded himself inside the Department of Homeland Security as an unpaid adviser, is out. DHS confirmed his departure on Friday with a terse statement that left no room for ambiguity.
"Mr. Lewandowski no longer has a role at DHS."
Politico reported that the departure tracks with the exit of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was recently named a special envoy for Western Hemisphere security issues.
Lewandowski had served at her side since she joined the Cabinet in February 2025, and he was photographed with Noem this week in Guyana during an official visit. DHS did not specify any future government role for Lewandowski.
Lewandowski's footprint at DHS was far larger than his title suggested. He came into the administration as a "special government employee," a classification that raised immediate questions about accountability and scope.
U.S. law limits temporary government employees to 130 days per year of unpaid work, and Lewandowski had been at the agency since the start of Noem's tenure in February 2025.
But the real issue was never the calendar. It was the authority. Lewandowski reportedly held the ability to veto any contract exceeding $100,000 at the agency, along with other high-level decisions. That is not advisory work. That is operational control exercised by someone outside the normal chain of command.
For a department at the forefront of the administration's aggressive immigration enforcement operations, that arrangement invited scrutiny that no one in conservative politics should welcome. The mission matters too much to be clouded by process questions.
An administration official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told reporters that Lewandowski was already facing heat over DHS's short-lived move last month to shut down TSA PreCheck. The initiative was quickly reversed, but the episode illustrated the kind of instability that erodes public confidence in execution.
Conservatives rightly expect the federal government to do fewer things and do them well. Border security, immigration enforcement, transportation safety: these are core functions. When a department stumbles on something as visible as PreCheck, it hands critics ammunition they didn't earn.
Meanwhile, DHS itself has been shut down since February of this year over a funding impasse. That context makes every misstep more expensive and every personnel question more pointed.
Lewandowski's relationship with the president stretches back a decade. He served as Trump's campaign manager in 2016 and was widely credited with the tactical decisions that led to the president's win in the New Hampshire primary that year. He was later removed from his post during an internal power struggle with then-campaign chair Paul Manafort, but remained close with Trump.
That closeness resurfaced in 2024, when Trump briefly named Lewandowski as a senior adviser to the presidential campaign. By October, he had been moved into a surrogate role. The pattern is familiar: Lewandowski orbits power, secures a position, and eventually departs under friction.
His relationship with Noem predates Washington entirely. Lewandowski started working as a political adviser to Noem while she was the South Dakota governor, and he lobbied Trump to name her DHS chief. Once she joined the Cabinet, he played an outsize role at the department.
Earlier this month, Noem refused to answer questions from House Democrats about her relationship with Lewandowski. Media reports about the nature of that relationship have circulated, and Noem's refusal to engage only extended the story's shelf life.
This is a recurring failure mode in Washington. The substance of the questions matters less than the vacuum created by silence. When officials refuse to address straightforward inquiries, they cede the narrative to opponents who are happy to fill the void with speculation.
Lewandowski himself did not respond to an earlier request for comment about whether he would be staying in government.
The conservative case for strong border enforcement and a competent DHS is not complicated. Americans want the laws on the books enforced with professionalism and accountability. That mission requires a department free from distractions, whether they come from funding fights on Capitol Hill or personnel controversies within the building.
Lewandowski is gone. Noem has a new title. The department still needs to function. Whatever happened inside DHS over the past year, the work of securing the homeland doesn't pause for personnel drama.
The mission outlasts every adviser.
A brother and sister have been indicted after authorities say one of them planted a potentially deadly improvised explosive device outside MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, then fled to China before the bomb was even discovered.
Alen Zheng allegedly placed the IED in a secluded location outside the base's visitor center on March 10. Minutes later, he placed a cryptic 911 call stating a bomb had been planted, but refused to provide the exact location. Two days after that, both Alen and his sister Ann Mary Zheng boarded a flight to the People's Republic of China.
The device sat undetected for six days. An Air Force airman finally discovered it on March 16.
The sequence of events, laid out by U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida Greg Kehoe during a Thursday afternoon news conference, paints a picture of deliberate planning and attempted escape.
As Fox News reported, on March 10, the IED was planted. On March 11, the day after, prosecutors allege the siblings attempted to cover their tracks by selling a 2010 Mercedes-Benz to car dealer CarMax. On March 12, they fled to China. On March 16, the bomb was found. On March 17, Ann Mary Zheng was apprehended after returning to the U.S. via a Detroit airport. Alen Zheng remains in China.
A search of the siblings' home uncovered IED components consistent with the bomb found at the base. Investigators traced the 911 call to a burner phone Alen Zheng purchased at Best Buy.
The device was secured and flown via a borrowed Pasco County Sheriff's Office helicopter to an FBI explosives lab in Huntsville, Alabama. Kehoe, who served in Iraq, did not mince words about what investigators found:
"Anytime somebody puts an IED together — and I spent a lot of time in Iraq and I saw a lot of IEDs — there always is a level of professionalism. And quite a bit of professionalism when they end up being deadly. … [The explosive] certainly could have caused significant damage to people that were in the range."
This was not a teenager's firecracker stunt. This was a functional explosive planted outside a facility that houses the headquarters of U.S. Central Command, which is currently handling Operation Epic Fury against Iran.
Alen Zheng faces charges of attempted damage to government property by fire or explosion, unlawful making of a destructive device, and possession of an unregistered destructive device. He is looking at up to 40 years in prison. He is currently in China.
Ann Mary Zheng is charged with accessory after the fact and tampering with evidence. Prosecutors accuse her of hiding or damaging the Mercedes-Benz to prevent its use in legal proceedings. She faces up to 30 years.
Their mother, who has not been named, is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody pending deportation for a visa overstay. She has not been criminally charged as of Thursday afternoon.
Officials have not yet publicly confirmed a motive or ties to the Chinese government. But Kehoe noted the suspects "obviously felt quite strongly about something or anything that the United States government was doing."
As if the primary plot weren't enough, a third indictment was unsealed Thursday against Jonathan James Elder for an unrelated copycat threat. On March 18, just two days after the device was found, Elder allegedly called the base, making explicit threats and taunting officials about the "surprise at MacDill Visitor Center."
Investigators tracked Elder via cell phone and Facebook data. He was arrested at a care facility. He faces up to 10 years in prison for making a threat of an explosive.
Kehoe delivered a warning that applied to Elder and anyone else feeling inspired:
"If you harm somebody, if you threaten to harm somebody, or if you decide that you are going to get on the telephone and you're going to telephone a threat to someplace like MacDill Air Force Base, … you will be charged by this office."
FBI Director Kash Patel framed the indictments as proof that targeting American military personnel carries a guaranteed response. In a statement to Fox News Digital, Patel was direct:
"No one who targets our brave service members and military facilities will ever get away with it — and this FBI will pursue all those responsible for the incident at MacDill Air Force Base to the ends of the earth."
That pledge matters because one of the suspects is sitting in China right now. Alen Zheng planted a bomb outside a base that runs combat operations in the Middle East, called in a vague warning designed to terrorize rather than save, tried to sell off the evidence, and flew to a country that does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.
The question of motive hangs over this case like a cloud. Officials are careful to say they haven't confirmed a connection to Beijing. Fair enough. But the facts speak their own language: a bomb at CENTCOM's front door, a flight to the PRC within 48 hours, and a mother in ICE custody for overstaying her visa. Whatever investigation follows will need to pursue every thread without diplomatic squeamishness.
MacDill Air Force Base is not a symbolic target. It is an operational nerve center. CENTCOM coordinates military action across the most volatile region on earth from behind those gates. An IED outside the visitor center is not just a criminal act. It is an act aimed at the people who defend this country.
The airman who found the device six days after it was planted deserves recognition. The investigators who traced a burner phone, a CarMax transaction, and a flight manifest to build this case in days deserve credit. The system worked, eventually.
But "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. A functional IED sat undetected outside a major military installation for nearly a week. The suspect who built it is beyond the reach of American law enforcement. And within 48 hours of the bomb's discovery, a copycat was already calling in threats.
Kehoe said it plainly:
"We are simply not going to tolerate this type of conduct here in the Middle District of Florida."
Good. Now bring the one in China home to prove it.