Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters Thursday that the Senate's scheduled two-week spring break is in jeopardy if lawmakers cannot pass legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the rest of the fiscal year.
"We need to get this resolved and it needs to get resolved, you know, by the end of next week."
The Senate is currently expected to break for recess next Friday. Thune made clear he has no intention of letting that happen with DHS still unfunded.
"I can't see us taking a break if the [department's] still shut down."
The department entered a shutdown last month after Senate Democrats blocked the House's DHS funding bill over objections to immigration enforcement provisions. The impasse has dragged on since, with no resolution in sight and the agencies responsible for securing the border left operating under crisis-level constraints.
The pattern here is worth examining carefully.
Senate Democrats killed the House-passed funding bill because it included robust immigration enforcement measures. That much is straightforward. But last week, when senators attempted to break the deadlock, Democrats shifted the goalposts. They claimed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection still need "major reforms" before they would agree to fund them.
Follow the logic. Democrats refuse to fund the agencies tasked with enforcing immigration law, then argue those same agencies are broken and need to be restructured before they deserve funding. It is a closed loop designed to ensure one outcome: that enforcement never gets the resources it needs.
This is not a negotiating posture. It is a defunding strategy dressed up in the language of reform. If ICE and CBP need improvement, the path forward is to fund them and legislate the changes. Starving the agencies of operating money while demanding they transform themselves is not governance. It is sabotage with a press release.
The White House escalated its involvement Thursday, Just the News reported, sending border czar Tom Homan to Capitol Hill to meet with a bipartisan group of senators. Homan's presence signaled that the administration views the Senate stalemate as a direct threat to its border security agenda and is willing to engage personally to move things forward.
The meeting ended without an agreement, according to attendees. No details emerged about what, specifically, prevented a deal.
That silence is telling. When bipartisan meetings produce breakthroughs, senators race to microphones. When they produce nothing, the hallways go quiet. Thursday's hallways were quiet.
Thune's threat to cancel recess is not merely procedural housekeeping. It is a calculated move that uses the one thing senators value more than legislative positioning: time at home.
With the midterms in November, every week away from Washington is a week spent fundraising, rallying base voters, and shoring up support in competitive races. Canceling recess forces Democrats to choose between their obstruction strategy and their campaign calendars. That is a trade most senators would rather not make.
It also keeps public attention fixed on the question Democrats least want to answer: why are you blocking funding for the department responsible for homeland security?
The longer DHS operates in shutdown, the harder it becomes for Democrats to frame their position as principled oversight rather than political obstruction. Border security consistently ranks among the top concerns for voters. Shutting down the department charged with delivering it, then leaving town for two weeks, is not a message any campaign strategist would design on purpose.
The math has not changed. The House passed its bill. The Senate needs to act. Democrats have the votes to block but not the votes to offer a credible alternative, and every day the shutdown continues, the political cost of their position compounds.
Thune has drawn a clear line. The Senate stays until DHS is funded, or senators explain to their constituents why securing the homeland was less important than a spring vacation.
That is not a hard choice. It only looks like one if you have been trying to avoid making it.
The White House swapped out Barack Obama's portrait from its prominent position in the main entrance hall and replaced it with a painting of President Donald Trump captured during the June 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. The move, revealed in a video shared by podcast host Benny Johnson from inside the White House, has drawn more than 2.2 million views on X and sent the internet into predictable hysterics.
Johnson's video panned to show Obama's portrait repositioned partway up a staircase, well removed from the Grand Foyer where it once hung. He called the placement the "funniest thing" and captioned the post with an invitation for followers to come see for themselves.
Neither the White House nor President Trump has publicly commented on the video or on the placement of Obama's portrait.
Presidential portraits inside the White House are not governed by law; they're governed by the sitting president, Newsweek noted. Every administration rotates artwork, photographs, and decor to reflect its own priorities. A White House official noted that "the photos around the complex are constantly updated and rotated as new photos are captured."
So the decision to move Obama's portrait from the most visible wall in the building and replace it with an image of Trump surviving an assassination attempt is not a violation of protocol. It's an exercise of it. Presidents choose what hangs on their walls. This one chose a painting that commemorates the moment a bullet nearly ended his life, and he stood back up.
That image, Trump with his fist raised in Butler, has become one of the most iconic photographs in modern American political history. Hanging it in the entrance hall isn't trolling. It's a statement about resilience, and it belongs to the man who lives there.
The reaction online was swift and entirely predictable. The same crowd that spent years insisting presidential norms are sacred suddenly discovered that portrait placement is a matter of grave national concern. The same people who cheered when institutions were bent to serve their preferred outcomes now want rigid adherence to tradition when it comes to wall art.
This is worth noting not because the outrage matters, but because of what it reveals. Obama's portrait wasn't destroyed. It wasn't removed from the White House. It was moved to a staircase. The hysteria treats a change in interior decorating as though it were a constitutional crisis.
Meanwhile, the same commentators who are apoplectic about where a painting hangs had nothing to say when a photograph of Russian leader Vladimir Putin displayed in the White House sparked its own round of outrage. The cycle is always the same:
Rotating portraits inside the building you occupy is not an act of aggression. It's what every president does. The difference is that this president doesn't pretend otherwise.
The deeper story here isn't about Obama at all. It's about what Trump chose to put in the frame's place.
The Butler painting represents something specific: a president who was shot at, who bled, and who stood up before the Secret Service could finish pulling him down. Whatever your politics, that moment happened. It is a fact of American history, and it is now the first thing visitors see when they walk into the White House.
Compare that with the alternative framing being pushed online, which treats the swap as a petty slight against Obama. One reading center's survival and defiance. The other centers on ego and grievance. The painting itself answers the question of which interpretation holds up.
It also tells you something about how this White House views its own story. The first Trump term was defined largely by its opponents. The second term is being defined by the man who survived an attempt on his life and came back to win the presidency again. The portrait in the foyer makes that narrative visible. Literally.
The broader pattern here is worth watching. Every time the Trump White House exercises ordinary presidential authority in a way that offends progressive sensibilities, the response is to recast a discretionary decision as a norm violation. Portrait placement becomes "desecration." Staff changes become "purges." Policy reversals become "attacks on democracy."
This framing works only if you accept the premise that the previous administration's choices were neutral defaults rather than political decisions of their own. They weren't. Obama chose what hung in the White House when he was president. Trump is doing the same.
The people who can't believe what Trump has done with the Obama portrait should consider what they're really objecting to. It isn't the location of a canvas. It's the reminder that someone else is in charge now, and he's not shy about it.
A 27-year-old Oregon man called 911 on Sunday to report his infant son missing from a hotel room, spinning a story about a child snatched from a car seat through an open window. Hours later, he confessed to killing the boy days earlier and dumping his body in a river.
Jared Scott Jeremy Stoller now faces first-degree murder and abuse of a corpse charges in connection with the death of his 11-month-old son, Jackson. He faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted.
Officers responded to the Relax Inn in Sutherlin, Oregon, just before 10 a.m. Sunday after Stoller's 911 call. According to the New York Post, Stoller desperately claimed the boy had been snatched out of a car seat he'd been sleeping in, through a window that had been opened while Stoller himself was asleep.
The Douglas County Sheriff's Office found "suspicious circumstances." That suspicion proved well-founded. Detectives interviewed Stoller, and what followed was far worse than a kidnapping.
"Stoller was interviewed by detectives from the Douglas County Sheriff's Office and eventually confessed that he had murdered Jackson days earlier at a location in Roseburg."
Roseburg sits about 20 miles north of the hotel where Stoller placed the call. After killing the child, Stoller told detectives that he had disposed of Jackson's body in the South Umpqua River. The Sheriff's Office Dive Team, assisted by boats from Oregon State Police and Douglas County, recovered the baby's body. It was taken to the medical examiner's office for an autopsy.
The entire narrative Stoller constructed, the frantic call, the open window, the missing child, was a fabrication layered on top of something unspeakable.
Stoller was ordered held without bail during his arraignment hearing on Monday, which he attended remotely from an isolation cell at Douglas County Jail. He appeared clad in a suicide-prevention smock. His next court appearance is scheduled for Friday.
Court records show Stoller had been ordered to pay child support to the boy's mother in 2025. Several key details remain unknown:
Court documents reportedly suggest Stoller may have characterized the death as an accident, though no direct quote or specific filing has been cited to support that claim. A defense attorney for Stoller could not be reached for comment.
There is no political spin that belongs on a dead 11-month-old. There is only the fact of it. A child who could not walk, could not speak, could not defend himself, was killed by the one person the law entrusted to protect him. Then the man who killed him called the police and lied about it.
Cases like this expose something conservatives have long understood: the justice system's most important function is not rehabilitation or social engineering. It is the protection of the innocent from the violent. An 11-month-old boy represents the most distilled version of that principle. Jackson could not call for help. He could not flee. He was entirely dependent on adults, and the adult responsible for him allegedly became his killer.
The instinct in modern criminal justice circles is to ask what systemic failure led to this moment. What services were lacking? What intervention might have changed the outcome? Those questions have their place. But they cannot be allowed to obscure the more fundamental reality: a man confessed to murdering his infant son and throwing him in a river. The system's job now is to ensure he never has the opportunity to do anything like it again.
Life without parole exists for moments precisely like this one.
Jackson was 11 months old. He never saw his first birthday. The South Umpqua River carried him, and the divers who pulled him out carried him home. That is where this story ends, and where accountability must begin.
The BBC is urging a Florida court to throw out President Trump's multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuit over a deceptively edited Panorama episode, arguing the court has no jurisdiction because the program never aired in the United States.
The British broadcaster's legal challenge rests on a simple geographic claim: the episode in question ran only on UK television channels and the BBC's UK streaming service, iPlayer. It was never distributed on American soil.
A BBC spokesperson put it plainly:
"It wasn't available to watch in the US on iPlayer, online or any other streaming platforms."
The BBC has therefore challenged the personal jurisdiction of the Florida court where Trump filed the suit.
Here's the critical backdrop that the BBC's jurisdictional maneuvering cannot erase: the corporation has already apologized to President Trump over the Panorama edit. It acknowledged the problem. It just refused to pay for it.
Trump's lawsuit alleges the BBC engaged in "intentionally, maliciously, and deceptively doctoring" his speech to make it appear he had directly encouraged his supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, BBC.com noted. The editing, according to the suit, spliced together his remarks in a way that manufactured a narrative the raw footage doesn't support.
The BBC previously rejected Trump's demands for compensation and disagreed that there was a basis for a defamation and trade practices claim. So the network's position, reduced to its essentials, is this: we admit the edit was wrong enough to apologize for, but not wrong enough to be held accountable for in court.
That's a distinction without a meaningful difference if you're the one being defamed.
The BBC's court filings lean heavily on the argument that the documentary never reached American audiences through legitimate channels. According to the documents:
"The BBC has never made the documentary available on BritBox, BBC.com, or any other distribution platform available in the US."
The broadcaster also pointed to its enforcement efforts against viewers who might try to circumvent geographic restrictions:
"The BBC prohibits the unauthorised use of VPNs to watch iPlayer from outside the UK and takes active steps to enforce this ban."
The strategy is transparent. By framing this as a programme that never crossed the Atlantic, the BBC hopes to avoid answering for the content itself. Fight the venue, not the substance. It's a classic litigation tactic, and it tells you something that the BBC's first instinct isn't to defend the accuracy of its journalism but to argue that an American court has no right to evaluate it.
The BBC's filing also warns of what it calls a "chilling effect" if the case proceeds. That phrase deserves scrutiny. Legacy media outlets invoke the chilling effect whenever they face consequences for editorial choices. The argument is always the same: holding us accountable will discourage future journalism.
But the chilling effect argument cuts both ways. What chills public trust faster than a major international broadcaster admitting it doctored footage of a world leader, apologizing for it, and then fighting in court to avoid any consequences? The BBC wants the freedom to manipulate footage without the accountability that follows.
This is a network funded by mandatory license fees from British citizens, operating with the institutional weight of a quasi-governmental entity, and it produced an edit so misleading that it had to issue an apology. The question isn't whether journalism should be free from interference. The question is whether a taxpayer-funded broadcaster that admits to deceptive editing gets to hide behind national borders when the subject of that deception seeks legal remedy.
The jurisdictional question will be decided by the Florida court, and the legal arguments on both sides are genuine. Courts regularly wrestle with whether foreign media entities that publish content abroad can be hauled into American courtrooms.
But the political dimension is unmistakable. Foreign media outlets spent years producing coverage of Trump that ranged from hostile to fabricated, operating under the assumption that geographic distance provided legal immunity. If a Florida court finds jurisdiction here, it establishes that deceptive editing targeting an American president carries consequences regardless of where the broadcast originates.
The BBC has approached the White House for comment. The network that doctored footage of the president now waits for the president's office to respond to its legal maneuvering.
The apology already told us everything we need to know. Everything since has been an exercise in avoiding the bill.
Democrat Ohio Rep. Joyce Beatty filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and the Kennedy Center's board of trustees, claiming she had been deliberately excluded from an upcoming March 16 meeting about plans to overhaul the Kennedy Center. There was just one problem: she had been invited. The email was sitting in her spam folder.
According to the Daily Caller, Beatty's attorneys confirmed the discovery in updated court filings after the Department of Justice argued that she had, in fact, been extended an invitation. The congresswoman, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, had built her legal case on the premise that the administration was shutting her out. The entire foundation of the complaint collapsed the moment someone checked the junk mail.
Betsy Klein captured the moment perfectly on March 12:
"In today's edition of Washington is Veep: A Democratic congresswoman made a legal complaint against President Donald Trump for, in part, excluding her from an upcoming Kennedy Center board meeting. The invitation, it turned out, was in her spam folder. Aide filed an update today:"
Beatty filed court documents early in March seeking a temporary restraining order to ensure her participation in the March 16 meeting, where plans to overhaul the Kennedy Center are set to be formalized, according to the Daily Caller. She told reporters that invitations to board meetings were typically sent to her official scheduler and chief of staff, suggesting a deliberate break in protocol.
Her legal team also claimed that Kennedy Center executive director Richard Grenell and the Center's general counsel "ignored her for two days" when she reached out. Lawyer Norm Eisen, speaking to reporters after Thursday's court hearing before U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, tried to reframe the debacle:
"I doubt there's a single person here who hasn't had an email vanished somewhere in a spam filter."
He followed up with what was apparently meant to be a saving argument:
"But the important thing is the congresswoman checked and they were silent."
She checked after filing a federal lawsuit. That is not diligence. That is the legal equivalent of calling the fire department before looking to see if the stove is on.
Even setting aside the spam folder fiasco, Beatty's legal position was thin from the start. DOJ lawyer William Jankowski made the administration's stance clear during Thursday's arguments:
"To be sure, Plaintiff will not be permitted to vote."
He explained why:
"But that is because, under the Center's bylaws and established procedure, ex officio trustees have no right to vote."
So the meeting Beatty claimed she was being locked out of was one she was invited to attend, but wouldn't have been able to vote at, regardless. She sued for a seat she already had, at a table where her vote was never on the menu.
This is not Beatty's first swing at the Kennedy Center. She previously sued Trump and other board members in December over what she characterized as attempts to "rename, shutter and gut" the institution. The March lawsuit was an escalation built on the same theory: that the administration was deliberately sidelining congressional oversight of the Center's future.
That theory required, at a minimum, actual exclusion. It did not survive contact with a spam filter.
This is what happens when the instinct to litigate against the administration outruns the instinct to verify basic facts. The legal system becomes a press release generator. File first, check email later. The assumption is always malice, never incompetence, and certainly never the mundane reality that automated filters do what automated filters do.
Congressional Democrats have spent the last year framing every administrative action at the Kennedy Center as an existential cultural threat. Every personnel decision, every renovation proposal, every board meeting becomes evidence of authoritarian overreach. The volume stays at ten regardless of what actually happened.
That strategy has a cost. When you treat every development as a crisis, the moments that might warrant genuine concern get lost in the noise. Beatty's spam folder lawsuit doesn't just embarrass her. It undermines the credibility of every future objection her caucus raises about the Kennedy Center or anything else.
After the updated filing, Beatty's own attorneys conceded the point with lawyerly understatement:
"Plaintiff appreciates Defendants' confirmation that she can attend the meeting at the White House."
She could have appreciated that confirmation a lot sooner. All it required was checking her email.
A body discovered without a head, hands, or clothing on a rural road in upstate New York in March 1970 has finally been identified as Clyde A. Coppage, a 35-year-old originally from Pennsylvania. His killer remains unknown.
New York State Police announced the identification this week, the result of DNA advancements and FBI assistance that closed one chapter of a case that has haunted Allegany County for more than half a century. But the most important chapter, who murdered and dismembered Coppage and dumped his body on Davis Hill Road in Andover, remains wide open.
When Coppage's remains were found in 1970, investigators had almost nothing to work with. No head. No hands. No clothing. No identification of any kind. The mutilation appeared deliberate, designed to make identification impossible.
Trooper James O'Callaghan noted that the evidence suggested Coppage was killed and dismembered somewhere else before his body was left on the road. Whoever did this didn't just commit murder. They tried to erase a man's identity, as Fox News reports.
And for 56 years, it worked.
Coppage was never reported missing. A man from Pennsylvania was found dead in rural New York, with no one looking for him. That detail alone raises questions that the passage of time makes harder, not easier, to answer. Who was Clyde Coppage? What brought him to Allegany County? And who wanted him not just dead but unrecognizable?
The New York State Police did not give up on the case. As the agency stated in its release:
"Over the course of nearly 56 years, investigating members of the New York State Police continued to track down every lead, but the identity of the male remained unknown."
In June 2022, investigators exhumed Coppage's body to develop a DNA profile. With the FBI's assistance, that profile eventually produced an identification. The specific technology and process that made it possible were not detailed, but the result speaks for itself: a nameless victim finally has a name.
It is worth pausing on that timeline. The exhumation happened nearly four years ago. The identification came only now. DNA work at this level is painstaking, and the fact that law enforcement pursued it at all on a case this old reflects a commitment to resolution that deserves recognition.
The Bureau of Criminal Investigation out of NYSP Amity is now asking the public for help with any information about Coppage or his killer. The investigation remains active.
Fifty-six years is a long time. Whoever killed Clyde Coppage may well be dead themselves. But "may" is not "is," and cold cases have been broken on less. The identification itself proves that. A case everyone assumed was unsolvable just yielded its biggest breakthrough in half a century.
There is something deeply unsettling about a murder designed to strip a person of their very identity. It is not just violence. It is an attempt at annihilation, to make someone disappear so completely that the world never even knows to ask what happened to them. For 56 years, that plan succeeded. Coppage existed in the files only as an unidentified set of remains on a back road in Andover.
He has his name back now. What he still needs is justice.
A federal judge ruled Friday that the Trump administration unlawfully refused to request funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, ordering acting director Russ Vought to resume drawing the agency's operating funds from the Federal Reserve.
U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, an Obama appointee who serves in San Jose, rejected the administration's legal interpretation that the Fed lacked the earnings to fund the bureau. The ruling forces the CFPB to keep its financial lifeline intact, at least for now, in the latest judicial effort to prevent the administration from dismantling the agency through bureaucratic maneuvering.
The core of the dispute is simple. Under federal law, the Federal Reserve Board must use its "combined earnings" to transfer whatever amount the CFPB director determines is "reasonably necessary" for operations.
Last November, Vought adopted the position that "combined earnings" should be calculated by subtracting the Fed's interest expenses from its revenues. Under that interpretation, the Fed wasn't profitable, which meant there was nothing to transfer.
Judge Davila dismantled the argument in his written ruling:
"Given that the Director has no authority to define or calculate the Federal Reserve's 'combined earnings,' Defendants' entire basis for not requesting funding from the Federal Reserve crumbles."
In other words, the CFPB director doesn't get to redefine how the Fed counts its money. The statute says "combined earnings." It doesn't invite the bureau's director to freelance a new accounting methodology that conveniently zeroes out the balance sheet, as The Hill reports.
The government has said that even under its own definition, the Fed has returned to profitability. Which raises the obvious question: if your own math now works against your position, what exactly are you defending?
Here's where this gets interesting for conservatives, and where the legal strategy collides with the broader policy goal.
The CFPB was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. From the beginning, conservatives have rightly objected to its structure: an agency funded outside the congressional appropriations process, housed at the Fed, insulated from the democratic accountability that's supposed to govern how Washington spends money.
It is, by design, a bureaucratic fortress. Congress doesn't control its budget. The president's leverage over it is limited. It was built to be untouchable, and that's precisely what makes it a problem.
But the fight over the CFPB's existence and the fight over whether the current director can unilaterally redefine how the Fed calculates its earnings are two different fights. Courts were never going to let the executive branch win the second one as a shortcut around the first. The statute is the statute. If it's a bad statute, the remedy is legislative, not an accounting trick that a single federal judge can swat down on a Friday afternoon.
This is the frustration with bureaucratic combat in Washington. The CFPB's design is genuinely problematic. Its funding mechanism was specifically engineered to avoid congressional oversight. Those are serious structural concerns that deserve serious structural solutions.
When the strategy shifts to creative statutory interpretation, it hands judges like Davila easy wins and generates headlines that make the agency look sympathetic.
This ruling doesn't exist in a vacuum. A judge in New York heard near-identical arguments Thursday in a case brought by more than 20 Democratic-led states.
Another judge previously issued a similar ruling that remains in effect, stemming from a lawsuit brought by the National Treasury Employees Union. An appeals court is reviewing that decision after hearing oral arguments late last month.
The lawsuit before Judge Davila was filed by three organizations that rely on CFPB services: Rise Economy, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, and the Woodstock Institute. The legal coalition arrayed against the funding freeze now spans unions, advocacy groups, and a significant bloc of state attorneys general. Every new ruling adds momentum.
Davila also issued a pointed warning about timing, noting that the "end of the second 2026 fiscal quarter rapidly approaches, and they have provided no assurances that they will seek funding from the Federal Reserve again." The judge is watching the calendar, and he's signaling he won't let the delay accomplish what the legal argument couldn't.
The appeals process will ultimately determine whether these rulings hold. But the trajectory is clear: courts are not going to permit the CFPB to be defunded through executive reinterpretation of a funding statute. The legal consensus across multiple jurisdictions is forming fast.
For conservatives who want the CFPB reformed or eliminated, the path runs through Congress. It always has. The agency's independence from appropriations was the original sin of its design, and undoing that sin requires legislation, not litigation gymnastics that lose in court and hand the left a narrative about consumer protection under siege.
The CFPB remains a bureaucracy built to resist accountability. That hasn't changed. But beating it requires fighting on terrain where conservatives can actually win.
Jeffrey Epstein's longtime accountant told the House Oversight Committee under oath that he never witnessed any financial transaction between Epstein and President Donald Trump or anyone in Trump's family. Five witnesses have now testified to the same thing.
Richard Kahn, one of the executors of Epstein's estate, sat for a closed-door deposition on Wednesday at the Rayburn Building as part of the committee's investigation into how the federal government handled Epstein's case. Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., spoke to reporters afterward and delivered the headline Democrats clearly did not want.
"Mr. Kahn testified under oath that — because the Democrats asked this question — that he had never seen any type of transaction to Trump or anyone in his family."
Note the detail Comer tucked in there: "because the Democrats asked this question." They went fishing. They came back empty.
Comer made a point of tallying the results so far.
"That makes the fifth witness now that's testified under oath that they've never seen any involvement by Donald Trump or the family."
Five depositions. Five witnesses. Five times under oath. Zero evidence connecting the president to Epstein's financial network. At some point, the absence of evidence stops being a gap and starts being the answer. Democrats on the committee keep asking the same question, and the witnesses keep giving the same response. The investigation is doing exactly what investigations are supposed to do: follow facts wherever they lead, even when the destination disappoints one side of the aisle.
Kahn did confirm that five people paid significant sums of money to Epstein. Comer identified them:
Fox News reported that according to Comer, Kahn said Epstein was "under the impression" he made his money as a tax advisor and financial planner. Epstein was known to have served as a financial advisor for each of the five.
That list is where the real story lives. A convicted sex trafficker embedded himself among billionaires and dynastic wealth, and the question Congress should be pressing is how federal investigators allowed that arrangement to persist for as long as it did. The committee's mandate is to examine how the government handled Epstein's case, and the financial map Kahn sketched out provides far more meaningful terrain than the Trump-focused fishing expeditions Democrats keep launching.
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., offered reporters a different version of the deposition. He claimed Kahn testified that a "person who was an accuser of Donald Trump was given a settlement by Jeffrey Epstein's estate."
That framing lasted about as long as you'd expect. A person familiar with the deposition said Kahn's attorneys went back on the record to correct the claim.
"Earlier testimony from Kahn about the Trump accuser receiving a settlement from the Epstein estate is incorrect. When the Democrats asked about Jane Doe 4, they were talking about someone else. Kahn's attorneys went back on the record to clarify that the person the Dems thought was Jane Doe 4 was not an individual they had ever heard of."
So the Democrats' dramatic reveal required an immediate correction from the witness's own legal team. This is what happens when you build a question around a conclusion you've already reached. The facts refuse to cooperate.
Subramanyam also mentioned that "another head of state" came up during testimony as having financial transactions with Epstein. He did not elaborate on who that was. If that detail matters, and it likely does, it deserves the same scrutiny the committee has given every other lead. Names matter more than innuendo.
The Oversight Committee has now deposed multiple figures connected to Epstein's world, including Ghislaine Maxwell, in a closed-door session in February. Each round produces the same dynamic: Democrats arrive hoping to build a case against the president, and each round, the testimony fails to deliver one.
Five witnesses under oath is not a technicality. It is a consistent, repeated, sworn record. If even one of those witnesses had produced a receipt, a wire transfer, or a single documented connection, it would have led every newscast in the country. Instead, silence from the evidence and noise from the Democrats.
The serious questions in this investigation have always been about institutional failure. How did Epstein operate for so long? How did a man with a prior federal conviction for sex offenses maintain a financial advisory empire among the world's wealthiest people? Which prosecutors, which agencies, which officials looked the other way?
Those are the questions that protect future victims. Those are the questions that expose the rot. But they require following the evidence rather than a political obsession.
Five witnesses have now testified. The record speaks for itself.
The United States destroyed 10 Iranian mine-laying vessels in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, President Trump announced, warning Tehran that any attempt to mine the critical waterway would be met with military force "at a level never seen before."
Trump disclosed the strikes on Truth Social after intelligence reports surfaced indicating Iran had begun taking steps to deploy mines in the strait. The boats were described as "inactive," and Trump said more strikes would follow.
"I am pleased to report that within the last few hours, we have hit, and completely destroyed, 10 inactive mine laying boats and/or ships, with more to follow!"
The message was blunt. The action was faster.
Roughly one-fifth of the globe's oil travels through the Strait of Hormuz, Fox News noted. It is one of the most strategically vital chokepoints on earth, and Iran has spent decades cultivating the implicit threat that it could shut it down. Mining that strait wouldn't just be an act of aggression against the United States. It would be an act of economic sabotage against every nation that depends on global energy markets.
That's the context for what happened Tuesday. CBS News Senior White House Correspondent Jennifer Jacobs reported that U.S. intelligence assets had "begun to see indications Iran is taking steps to deploy mines in the Strait of Hormuz shipping lane." Citing CBS News National Security Coordinating Producer Jim LaPorta, Jacobs added further detail:
"Iran is using smaller crafts that can carry two to three mines each. While Iran's mine stock isn't publicly known, estimates over the years have ranged from roughly 2,000 to 6,000 naval mines of Iranian, Chinese, and Russian-made variants."
Two to three mines per craft doesn't sound like much. But multiply that across a stockpile of potentially thousands, deployed in one of the narrowest and most heavily trafficked shipping lanes in the world, and the threat sharpens considerably.
Trump's Truth Social posts left no room for diplomatic ambiguity. He addressed the mine threat directly, stating that while the U.S. had "no reports" of mines actually being deployed, any such action would demand immediate reversal.
"If for any reason mines were placed, and they are not removed forthwith, the Military consequences to Iran will be at a level never seen before."
He then offered Tehran something it rarely gets from an American president: a clearly marked off-ramp.
"If on the other hand, they remove what may have been placed, it will be a giant step in the right direction!"
That sequence matters. The threat came first. The exit came second. And neither was vague. Trump told Iran exactly what would happen if it escalated and exactly what would happen if it stood down. This is how deterrence works: clarity backed by demonstrated capability.
Trump also revealed that the military technology being used to neutralize the mine-laying vessels is the same capability deployed against drug traffickers. Any boat or ship attempting to mine the strait, he said, would "be dealt with quickly and violently."
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt drove the point home during Tuesday's White House briefing, matching the president's tone with precision:
"As the president made unequivocally clear to the remaining elements of this terrorist regime in his statement yesterday, if they do anything to stop the flow of oil or goods within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the world's most powerful military 20 times harder than they have been hit thus far."
Twenty times harder. That's not a negotiating posture. That's a promise with a multiplier attached.
What separates this moment from years of prior U.S. posturing in the region is the sequencing. The boats were destroyed before the warning was even posted. The president didn't telegraph the strike. He announced it after it happened. That ordering communicates something no diplomatic cable can: the United States is already operating, not deliberating.
For years, the Iranian regime has leaned on the assumption that the Strait of Hormuz is its trump card, that the threat of disruption alone would restrain American action. That assumption took a hit on Tuesday. Ten vessels worth of it.
Iran's leadership now faces a calculation it hasn't had to make in quite some time. The mines haven't been deployed, according to U.S. reports. The window to step back is still open. But the wreckage of those ten boats sits as a quiet reminder of what comes next if they don't.
Tehran has its off-ramp. The question is whether it's smart enough to take it.
Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf, the 27-year-old president and CEO of Star Autism Center LLC, pleaded guilty Monday to defrauding the state of Minnesota out of more than $6 million through bogus autism therapy claims. He founded the company in 2020 when he was just 22 years old. He ran it for about four years. And at his Monday plea hearing, he told the court he did not know any individuals with autism, according to KARE.
That last detail deserves a moment. A man who built a company supposedly providing "necessary one-on-one therapy to children with autism" admitted under oath that he didn't know a single person with the condition his business claimed to treat.
Yussuf now faces roughly five years in prison.
The Department of Justice charged Yussuf in December 2025 with making fraudulent Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI) claims to the Minnesota government, Alpha News reported. The DOJ's press release laid out a familiar playbook: Yussuf and his team would recruit parents of Somali descent, register them as "behavioral technicians," and then bill the state for therapy sessions that were, in the DOJ's words, "fraudulently inflated, billed without providers' knowledge, and for services that were not actually provided."
The parents received monthly cash kickbacks. Yussuf and his associates "shared in the proceeds." The funding source was Medicaid reimbursement, which means American taxpayers were footing the bill for therapy that never happened, delivered by people with no qualifications, for a company run by a man who had zero connection to the autism community.
And the money didn't sit idle. Yussuf reportedly spent over $100,000 on a Freightliner semi-truck and sent over $200,000 to Kenya.
Yussuf's case is not an isolated incident. The vast majority of defendants charged by the DOJ in recent Minnesota fraud schemes have been of Somali descent. Independent journalist Nick Shirley has drawn national attention to the issue through viral videos exposing alleged fraud in Minnesota's Somali community. The Trump administration has actively targeted perpetrators of health care fraud in the state over the past few months, treating Minnesota as something close to ground zero for Medicaid abuse.
The scale of the problem raises uncomfortable questions that Minnesota's political class has shown little interest in answering. How did a 22-year-old with no connection to autism establish a Medicaid-billing entity and extract millions from the state over four years without anyone in state government noticing? The Minnesota Department of Human Services processed these claims. Someone approved the payments. The system didn't fail because of one bad actor. It failed because the guardrails didn't exist, or no one bothered to enforce them.
This is what happens when a state builds an expansive benefits apparatus and then treats oversight as an afterthought. The money flows. The paperwork gets stamped. And the people who are supposed to be helped, in this case, children with autism, get nothing.
The Trump administration has not waited for Minnesota to clean up its own mess. Vice President JD Vance and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz announced on Feb. 25 "new steps to crack down" on Medicare and Medicaid fraud, including two actions aimed directly at the problem:
President Trump announced in January the creation of the Department of Justice Division for National Fraud Enforcement, a dedicated unit built to pursue exactly this kind of systemic theft.
These are not abstract policy signals. Deferring a quarter-billion dollars in Medicaid funding sends a message that Minnesota's lax oversight has consequences. The state has been content to distribute federal dollars with minimal accountability. Now the federal government is tightening the valve.
It is worth pausing on who actually gets hurt by schemes like this. Somali families in Minnesota who have children with genuine autism now operate under a cloud of suspicion they did nothing to create. Medicaid programs designed to help vulnerable children are being stretched thinner. And taxpayers, who are told endlessly that these programs are untouchable because they serve the vulnerable, learn once again that the money often serves someone else entirely.
The left's instinct will be to treat this as a story about one bad actor. It isn't. It's a story about a system that made fraud easy, a state that looked the other way, and a federal government that finally decided to look.
Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf didn't know anyone with autism. He didn't need to. He just needed a Medicaid billing code and a state that wouldn't ask questions.