Federal prosecutors investigating the alleged weaponization of intelligence against President Donald Trump have sent a formal request to the U.S. Senate for evidence tied to former CIA Director John Brennan. The request, described as secret and rare, seeks documents, transcripts, and testimony related to Brennan's statements about efforts to link Trump's 2016 campaign to Russian collusion.
The written request was sent last Friday by the team of U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones, who operates out of Miami and was assigned by Attorney General Pam Bondi to review evidence for possible crimes and conspiracy. Overtures between his team and the Senate began over the last month, and negotiations are now underway for the transfer of evidence, including a possible visit by prosecutors to Washington.
Meanwhile, a federal grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, has already begun collecting evidence.
Just the News reports that the core of the case against Brennan centers on what he told Congress versus what the record actually shows. In 2017, Brennan testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the now-discredited Steele Dossier played no role in the Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election. His words were unequivocal:
"[The dossier] was not used in any way as far as the judgments in the ICA were concerned."
He also told senators that top CIA officials were "very concerned about polluting the ICA with this material." The picture he painted was clear: the CIA resisted the dossier, and the dossier stayed out of the assessment.
That picture has since collapsed under the weight of declassified documents.
A declassified House Intelligence Committee report found the opposite of what Brennan claimed:
"[C]ontradicting public claims by the DCIA that the dossier 'was not in any way' incorporated into the ICA, the dossier was referenced in the ICA main body text, and further detailed in a two-page CIA annex."
That same report revealed that two senior CIA officers, one from Russia operations and the other from Russia analysis, argued directly with Brennan that the dossier should be excluded because it failed to meet basic tradecraft standards. Brennan overruled them. When one officer raised concerns, Brennan reportedly responded: "Yes, but doesn't it ring true?"
Analytical soundness, apparently, was optional if the narrative fit.
The story of how the Steele Dossier ended up inside a presidential intelligence assessment is a case study in institutional corruption dressed up as an interagency process.
In December 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe pushed to include the dossier, compiled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who had been hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS, in turn, was being paid by Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias. The dossier was, from its inception, a political product. It was later used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants against a Trump campaign official.
Comey testified before the Senate in June 2017 about his role in getting the material included:
"I insisted that we bring it to the party, and I was agnostic as to whether it was footnoted in the document itself, put as an annex. I have some recollection of talking to John Brennan maybe at some point saying: I don't really care, but I think it is relevant and so ought to be part of the consideration."
Brennan's own written position, as cited in a CIA review memo, stated that he believed "the information warrants inclusion in the report." This directly contradicts his testimony that the CIA opposed its inclusion.
On December 29, 2016, the CIA's own Deputy Director for Analysis emailed Brennan warning that including the dossier in any form risked "the credibility of the entire paper." Brennan proceeded anyway.
The result: the dossier was referenced as the fourth supporting bullet for the ICA's judgment that Putin "aspired" to help Trump win. A CIA review later concluded that this placement:
"[I]mplicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment."
That same review found Brennan "showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness." In plain English: he wanted a story, not the truth.
Adding another layer of institutional failure, the Senate Intelligence Committee itself issued reports in 2020 that appeared to provide cover for Brennan's claims. The committee's April 2020 report stated it "found that the information provided by Christopher Steele to the FBI was not used in the body of the ICA or to support any of its analytic judgments." Its August 2020 fifth volume echoed that the "dossier material was not used in the ICA and did not contribute to its findings."
These findings have since been contradicted by declassified documents showing the dossier was, in fact, referenced in the ICA's main body text and detailed in a two-page annex. A host of top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats, attempted to point to the 2020 Senate report to push back against evidence declassified by DNI Tulsi Gabbard.
The committee's own records are now the subject of the prosecution's request. That irony needs no commentary.
The scope of this investigation extends well beyond a single instance of alleged false testimony. FBI Director Kash Patel drafted a memo last year recommending that the full chain of actions against Trump and his allies, stretching from the Crossfire Hurricane probe through Special Counsel Jack Smith's now-dismissed indictments, be viewed as "an ongoing criminal conspiracy to deprive American citizens of their civil rights." That legal framework would allow prosecutors to charge crimes outside the standard five-year statute of limitations as overt acts of a continuing conspiracy.
This matters because Brennan's last known testimony contacts with the Senate occurred on June 23, 2017, and May 16, 2018, both well outside a standalone five-year window. His May 2023 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee falls within range, but the conspiracy framework opens a much broader field.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said last October that Brennan made "numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact," contradicted by the record established by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA itself. The committee formally referred Brennan for prosecution last year.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe followed with his own criminal referral to the FBI after conducting a "lessons-learned" review of the ICA. DNI Gabbard sent declassified evidence to the Justice Department in July, describing the matter as a "treasonous conspiracy" involving top intelligence officials during the Obama administration who allegedly politicized intelligence related to Russia and the 2016 election.
For years, the phrase "walls closing in" was a punchline, the breathless prediction of cable news anchors who were certain that Trump, not the people who surveilled his campaign, would face legal consequences. The irony is that the phrase may finally apply to the right target.
Brennan, now a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, did not respond to a request for comment sent through his lawyer. His post-government career as a cable news commentator has been spent reinforcing the very narrative his own agency's analysts warned him was analytically unsound.
The declassified House report put the matter bluntly:
"[B]y devoting nearly two pages of ICA text to summarizing the dossier in a high-profile assessment intended for the President and President-elect, the ICA misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports."
An intelligence assessment written at the direction of a sitting president, based partly on opposition research funded by the opposing candidate's campaign, was used to justify surveillance of American citizens and to cast a cloud over an incoming administration. The people who built that cloud are now the ones under investigation.
The grand jury in Fort Pierce is collecting evidence. The Senate is negotiating the transfer of documents spanning nearly a decade. And John Brennan, the man who told Congress the dossier wasn't part of the assessment while his own written communications show he pushed to put it there, sits in silence.
The record speaks loudly enough.
The U.S. Air Force is repainting Air Force One and the rest of the executive airlift fleet in a bold red, white, and dark blue color scheme, replacing the light blue and white design that has adorned presidential aircraft for more than six decades. The first C-32 has already been painted and is expected to be delivered to the Air Force in the next few months.
An Air Force spokesperson confirmed the scope of the project:
"The Air Force is implementing a new paint scheme requirement (red, white and dark blue) for VC-25B as well as the additional executive airlift fleet, which will include the new 747-8i and four C-32 aircraft."
The C-32s will be painted during regularly scheduled maintenance, meaning the overhaul rolls into existing upkeep cycles rather than requiring standalone operations. The VC-25B, the Defense Department's designation for its next-generation Boeing 747 airliners, will carry the new colors as well.
This is a story about persistence. During his first term, President Trump unveiled a model airplane bearing his preferred color scheme for Air Force One: the deep red, white, and blue of the American flag, Breitbart reported. It was a deliberate departure from the Kennedy-era aesthetic, which dates back to the early 1960s.
Then Joe Biden canceled the redesign for the VC-25Bs, according to CBS News. No fanfare. No public explanation of why a sitting president felt compelled to undo a predecessor's cosmetic preference for the presidential fleet. Just a quiet reversal, the kind of reflexive undoing that defined much of the Biden era's approach to anything bearing Trump's fingerprints.
Now it's back. Last summer, Trump put it plainly:
"We're painting it red, white and blue like the American flag, which is incredible."
And so it is happening.
Critics will call this vanity. They always do when a president puts his stamp on something visible. But the Kennedy-era livery wasn't sacred scripture. It was a design choice made by one administration and inherited, without serious reconsideration, by every administration since. Six decades is a long time to coast on inertia and call it tradition.
Something is fitting about a paint scheme modeled on the American flag flying on the aircraft that represents American power abroad. The light blue design carried its own elegance. But the argument that presidential aircraft should look like the flag of the country they represent is not exactly radical.
The fact that Biden felt the need to cancel a paint job tells you more about the previous administration's priorities than it does about this one's. There was no policy consequence to the Kennedy-era scheme. No strategic downside. The cancellation was purely symbolic, an act of erasure for its own sake. That the current administration simply reinstated its vision and moved forward speaks to a different operating philosophy: do the thing you said you'd do.
The scope extends beyond Air Force One itself. The full executive airlift fleet is getting the treatment, including:
L3 Harris's facility in Greenville, Texas, is involved in upgrading the Air Force Two planes, though the precise relationship between the upgrades and the repainting effort remains unclear from available information. What is clear is that the first repainted C-32 is already done and headed for delivery.
The original design will always carry historical weight. The image of President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy descending the stairs of Air Force One at Houston International Airport on November 21, 1963, the day before Dallas, is seared into the American memory. That pale blue fuselage is part of the visual vocabulary of a generation's grief.
But honoring history doesn't require freezing it in place. Every era marks its moment. The Kennedy design reflected midcentury restraint and sophistication. A red, white, and blue scheme reflects something more direct: the flag, unadorned. Both are legitimate aesthetic choices. Only one has been treated as untouchable.
After sixty years, the executive fleet finally looks like the country it serves.
Actor Shia LaBeouf was arrested in New Orleans early Tuesday after allegedly punching two people outside a Royal Street business during Mardi Gras celebrations, police say. The 39-year-old "Transformers" star was charged with two counts of simple battery.
According to the New Orleans Police Department, LaBeouf was kicked out of the business after causing a disturbance. What followed was not a graceful exit.
"Once removed from the building, the victim reported being struck by LaBeouf who used his closed fists on the victim several times."
Police said LaBeouf then left the scene, only to return "acting even more aggressively." He allegedly struck the same person again with a closed fist to the upper body, then punched a second person in the nose. Multiple bystanders held LaBeouf down until officers arrived.
He was transported to a hospital for treatment of "unknown injuries," then arrested upon release.
Early Wednesday morning, LaBeouf posted two words to his X account: "Free me."
This is not the first time LaBeouf has found himself on the wrong side of a police report, NBC News reported, and the timeline is not flattering.
When the FKA Twigs lawsuit was filed, LaBeouf issued a statement that read less like a denial and more like a confession:
"I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years. I have a history of hurting the people closest to me. I'm ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt."
He said at the time that he had no excuses for his "alcoholism or aggression, only rationalizations."
There is a particular species of famous person who collects arrest records the way other people collect frequent flyer miles. LaBeouf, a former Disney child actor who became a blockbuster leading man, has now racked up criminal charges across multiple states and over more than a decade. Each incident follows the same arc: the outburst, the arrest, the public contrition, and then silence until the next one.
The circumstances leading to Tuesday's incident remain unclear. Police have not said what triggered the initial disturbance inside the business, and representatives for LaBeouf did not respond to requests for comment. What is clear is the outcome: two people struck, one in the nose, and an actor in handcuffs.
TMZ reported that videos circulated online Tuesday night showing LaBeouf on the streets of New Orleans, seemingly partying with revelers in the French Quarter. Hours later, the "Free me" post went up.
There is something almost too neat about it. A man with a documented history of violence and addiction, who publicly acknowledged that history in his own words, winds up charged with battery during one of the most alcohol-soaked events on the American calendar. It is not surprising. That is the problem.
American culture has a weakness for the redemption narrative, especially when the person seeking redemption has a recognizable face. LaBeouf leaned into that arc in recent years, speaking publicly about faith and sobriety. The details of whether that journey was genuine are between him and the people in his life.
But the legal system does not run on narrative arcs. It runs on charges, evidence, and consequences. Two counts of simple battery now sit on LaBeouf's record alongside a trail of prior incidents stretching back more than a decade.
At some point, the apology stops being the story. The pattern is.
After two weeks of silence, speculation, and searches that turned up nothing, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos finally announced Monday that the family of 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie has been cleared as suspects in her disappearance. Every sibling. Every spouse. All of them.
What Nanos did not announce: who investigators actually suspect.
Nancy Guthrie, the mother of "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie, vanished after having dinner with her daughter Annie Guthrie and Annie's husband, Tommaso Cioni, on January 31. Cioni was the last person to see her alive, around 9:45 p.m. that evening. When Nancy failed to show up at a friend's house the next day to watch Sunday church, she was reported missing. She has not been seen since.
The announcement reported Monday by the New York Post capped what Nanos himself described as a "grueling two-week investigation," one that placed the Guthrie family under an extraordinary cloud. Annie Guthrie and Cioni's home was searched multiple times in the days following the disappearance. Search and rescue teams combed Nancy's neighborhood. Multiple non-family individuals were detained for questioning last week and released shortly after.
And for the duration, Nanos refused to rule out Cioni as a suspect when pressed by reporters, a posture that fed a growing wave of public speculation about the man who last saw Nancy alive. The sheriff's own silence did the damage.
Then, the day before Monday's announcement, Nanos told the Daily Mail he did not want Cioni to be "wrongly scrutinized" simply because he was the last person to see Nancy. Hours later, law enforcement sources told NBC News that police were "leaning away" from considering family members suspects. By Monday, the formal clearance arrived.
Nanos did not mince words about how the family had been treated in the court of public opinion:
"The family has been nothing but cooperative and gracious and are victims in this case. To suggest otherwise is not only wrong, it is cruel. The Guthrie family are victims plain and simple."
Strong words from the man whose own refusal to clear Cioni earlier helped fuel the very scrutiny he now calls cruel.
Here is what the public now knows after two weeks:
That is not a progress report. That is an admission that the investigation has produced no actionable lead that the public is allowed to see.
The delay in clearing the family deserves scrutiny of its own. Law enforcement routinely looks at those closest to a missing person first. That is standard procedure, not misconduct. But there is a difference between quietly investigating family members as part of standard protocol and allowing weeks of public suspicion to calcify around a son-in-law whose only known connection to the disappearance is that he ate dinner with his mother-in-law.
Nanos had every opportunity to get ahead of the narrative. He chose not to. Whether that was investigative caution or simple mismanagement of public communication, the result was the same: a family already enduring the nightmare of a missing loved one was subjected to the additional weight of implied guilt.
Savannah Guthrie, who has been off the air during the ordeal, appeared in an Instagram video with two others pleading to "Bring Nancy Guthrie home." It is a reminder that behind every cable news chyron and social media theory, a family is waiting for a phone call that hasn't come.
Cases like this expose a familiar tension. The public wants information. Law enforcement wants to protect the integrity of an active investigation. Both impulses are legitimate. But when authorities offer nothing, the internet fills the void. Sidebar reports have referenced everything from a ransom letter to DNA results from a glove to a Walmart backpack described as a "very promising lead." None of that has been substantively addressed by the sheriff's office.
Speculation is not evidence. But it thrives where transparency is absent. Nanos now owns a case with no named suspect, no public theory, and a family he spent two weeks allowing to twist in the wind before clearing them.
Nancy Guthrie is 84 years old. She has been missing for more than two weeks. Every day that passes without answers makes those answers less likely to come. The sheriff told us who didn't do it. The question that matters is the one he still cannot answer.
Former President Barack Obama took to Instagram on Sunday to clarify remarks from an interview released the day before in which he told liberal media personality Brian Tyler Cohen that aliens "are real" — a two-word answer that, predictably, lit up the internet before anyone bothered to listen to the rest of the sentence.
In the Saturday interview, Cohen lobbed a softball during what Obama described as a "speed round" segment:
"Are aliens real?"
Obama's response:
"They're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in — what is it —"
Cohen helpfully supplied "Area 51," and Obama ran with it:
"Area 51. There's no underground facility. Unless, there's this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States."
That last line — delivered with the kind of practiced ambiguity Obama has spent two decades perfecting — was enough to send the clip ricocheting across social media with all the nuance of a game of telephone.
By Sunday, Obama apparently realized that a former commander-in-chief casually affirming extraterrestrial life required a footnote. His Instagram clarification tried to thread the needle between cosmic wonder and bureaucratic sobriety:
"I was trying to stick with the spirit of the speed round, but since it's gotten attention let me clarify. Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there."
Then the pivot:
"But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!"
Note the exclamation point. When a former president feels the need to punctuate a denial about alien contact with "Really!" — you've entered a strange chapter of American public life.
Obama has flirted with this subject before, according to The Hill. Back in 2021, he appeared on CBS's "The Late Late Show" with James Corden and offered a similar routine — curiosity laced with just enough mystery to keep people talking:
"The truth is that when I came into office, I asked. I was like, 'All right, is there a lab somewhere where we're keeping the alien specimens and spaceship?'"
"And they did a little bit of research, and the answer was no."
Same story, same delivery, same result: breathless headlines, followed by a mundane conclusion. The pattern is worth noticing. Obama has a gift for making the unremarkable sound tantalizing and then retreating to safe ground once the clip goes viral.
What's actually interesting here has nothing to do with extraterrestrial life. It's the machinery around it.
A former president sits down with a friendly interviewer for a rapid-fire segment designed to generate clips, not substance. He delivers an answer — "they're real" — that is technically defensible but functionally misleading in isolation. The clip travels. The clarification follows a day later, extending the news cycle. By the time it's over, Obama has dominated a weekend of coverage without saying anything of consequence.
This is a man who left the White House nearly a decade ago. He holds no office. He commands no policy. Yet he retains an extraordinary ability to absorb media oxygen — and a willing ecosystem of interviewers happy to supply it.
Meanwhile, Cohen's role here is instructive. The interview format — a "speed round" with questions like "Are aliens real?" — isn't journalism. It's content production. It's designed to extract quotable moments from a willing participant in a setting where follow-up questions are structurally impossible. You don't get accountability from a speed round. You get clips.
The cycle is well-worn by now:
It's not a conspiracy. It doesn't need to be. It's just how the incentive structure works when a figure with Obama's cultural footprint has access to platforms that reward ambiguity over precision.
The aliens aren't here. The spin cycle never left.
The FBI asked Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos for DNA evidence and a black glove recovered in connection with the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie — the mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie — and he sent it to a private lab in Florida instead.
Not to the FBI's national crime laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, with its world-class forensic capabilities. To a private contractor in Florida that the sheriff's department regularly uses. As the investigation closed in on the two-week mark with no known proof of life, the sheriff with primary jurisdiction effectively cut the FBI out of the evidence chain.
An unnamed FBI source told Reuters the move has real consequences:
"It risks further slowing a case that grows more urgent by the minute."
The same source added:
"It's clear the fastest path to answers is leveraging federal resources and technology."
Pima County has reportedly spent about $200,000 sending evidence to the Florida lab. The FBI's Quantico facility — one of the most advanced forensic operations on the planet — would have processed it at no cost to the county. That's not a close call. That's a jurisdictional turf war dressed up as procedure.
Nancy Guthrie vanished in the early-morning hours of February 1 from her home in Pima County. Doorbell camera footage captured an armed, masked individual tampering with the camera around that time. Family members say she had a sound mind but suffered from limited mobility and needed daily medication to survive.
That last detail matters. Every day without resolution is a day closer to a point of no return.
DNA tests confirmed that traces of blood found on the front porch came from Nancy Guthrie. A black glove was recovered about a mile from the home. Several purported ransom notes have surfaced — delivered not to the family or law enforcement, but to news media outlets. The deadlines in those notes have lapsed. No proof of life has been provided, as The Daily Beast reports.
On Saturday, Savannah Guthrie posted a video alongside her siblings Annie and Camron, speaking directly to whoever took their mother:
"We beg you now to return our mother to us so that we can celebrate with her. This is the only way we will have peace. This is very valuable to us, and we will pay."
That's a daughter on camera, offering money to her mother's captor, because the investigation hasn't given her family anything else to hold onto.
The FBI's Phoenix field office shared new details about the suspect on Thursday, describing the individual as approximately 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 10 inches tall with an average build, wearing a black 25-liter Ozark Trail Hiker Pack backpack. The bureau is offering up to $100,000 for information leading to Nancy Guthrie's location or the arrest and conviction of anyone involved.
The doorbell camera images took more than a week to recover from what Patel described on Wednesday as "residual data located in backend systems." A week — in a case where hours matter.
On Tuesday, a man identified only as "Carlos," who described himself as a delivery driver, was brought in for questioning, and his residence was searched. He was released eight hours later. He told reporters he had no idea why he was brought in. No charges were filed.
So the public ledger of this investigation reads: one detained-and-released man who says he knows nothing, doorbell footage that took a week to extract, ransom notes sent to media rather than investigators, and critical physical evidence routed away from the FBI's best forensic tools at the sheriff's discretion.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department holds primary jurisdiction over the case. No one disputes that. The department has accepted the FBI's offer to provide assistance, which decides to bypass the FBI's crime lab all the more puzzling.
You don't accept federal help and then redirect evidence away from federal labs. That's not maintaining jurisdiction. That's maintaining control at the expense of outcomes. A woman is missing. She needs medication to survive. The family is publicly begging for her return. And the sheriff's priority is routing forensic evidence through his department's preferred vendor.
The Daily Beast contacted both the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff's Department for comment. Neither responded. Sheriff Nanos has offered no public explanation for the decision.
Silence, in a case like this, lands differently than it does in routine jurisdictional disputes. A family is waiting. The public is watching. And the man with the evidence won't say why he sent it to Florida instead of Quantico.
Federal investigators have the resources, the technology, and the capacity to process forensic evidence faster than a private lab contracting with a county sheriff's office. That's not opinion — it's infrastructure. The FBI built Quantico specifically for cases like this.
When a missing person case reaches the two-week mark with no arrest, no proof of life, and ransom notes whose deadlines have already expired, the window for a positive outcome narrows sharply. Every institutional friction point — every evidence delay, every jurisdictional standoff — costs time that Nancy Guthrie may not have.
The FBI offered $100,000, its Phoenix field office, and its crime lab. The sheriff took the first two and rejected the third. Somewhere in Florida, a private lab is processing the evidence that might bring a 54-year-old woman's mother home.
Savannah Guthrie and her siblings aren't waiting for jurisdiction to sort itself out. They're on camera, offering to pay a stranger for their mother's life. The least the people running this investigation can do is use the best tools available.
Donald T. Kinsella lasted less than a day as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York. Sworn in on Wednesday morning by a board of federal judges, he was out by Wednesday evening — removed by the White House without explanation.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the move on X with characteristic directness:
"Judges don't pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution. You are fired, Donald Kinsella"
Fox News reported that Morgan DeWitt Snow, the Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel, delivered the formal notification to Kinsella. The court that appointed him pushed back the next day. The White House has not publicly commented further.
The Northern District of New York has been without a Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney for some time, and the vacancy created a cascading series of legal disputes that set the stage for this week's confrontation.
In January, U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield ruled that the Department of Justice had taken improper action to keep John Sarcone III in the acting U.S. Attorney role past the 120-day statutory limit for attorneys the Senate hasn't confirmed. The ruling, reported by NBC News, declared that Sarcone was serving illegally. He subsequently demoted himself to first assistant attorney while awaiting an appeal.
That left a vacancy — and the federal court moved to fill it. The judges turned to 28 U.S.C. § 546(d), which empowers a district court to appoint a U.S. Attorney "to serve until the vacancy is filled."
They selected Kinsella, whom the court described as "a qualified, experienced former prosecutor" with "years of distinguished work on behalf of the citizens of the Northern District of New York."
He didn't make it to sundown.
What makes this dispute genuinely interesting — and not just another Beltway turf war — is that both sides are pointing to the same section of the Constitution and arriving at opposite conclusions.
Blanche cited Article II for the proposition that the President picks U.S. Attorneys. The court cited Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 right back, noting that the Constitution "expressly provides" for Congress to vest the appointment of officials like U.S. Attorneys "in the Courts of Law." The court's Thursday statement laid this out in detail:
"The Court exercised its authority under 28 U.S.C. § 546(d), which empowers the district court to 'appoint a United States Attorney to serve until the vacancy is filled.' The United States Constitution expressly provides for this grant of authority in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, which states in part: 'the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment' of officials such as United States Attorneys 'in the Courts of Law.' By the end of the day, Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel, Morgan DeWitt Snow notified Mr. Kinsella that he was removed as the judicially-appointed United States Attorney, without explanation."
So both sides invoke Article II. Both claim the text supports their position. The question is whether the executive branch can unilaterally remove someone the judiciary appointed under a statute Congress wrote for exactly this scenario.
There's a principle worth watching here that transcends the particulars of a single U.S. Attorney vacancy in upstate New York.
The 120-day limit exists for a reason — it's supposed to prevent the executive branch from parking unconfirmed appointees in powerful roles indefinitely, avoiding the Senate confirmation process the Founders designed. Judge Schofield's January ruling enforced that limit. The court's appointment of Kinsella was the statutory mechanism kicking in after the executive branch failed to fill the seat through proper channels.
The administration's position — that the President's appointment power supersedes a judicial appointment made under a congressional statute — raises a structural question that federal courts may ultimately have to resolve. Whether Kinsella's removal triggers a legal challenge remains to be seen. As of Friday, the fact sheet records no indication of one.
What's clear is the administration's posture: executive appointment authority is not something it intends to share, even temporarily, even when the vacancy exists because the Senate confirmation process stalled.
Kinsella himself has said nothing publicly. The White House hasn't responded to Fox News Digital's inquiry. The only parties on record are Blanche — via a social media post — and the court, via a carefully worded statement that reads less like a press release and more like the opening brief in a separation-of-powers case.
The court's closing line was pointed:
"The Court thanks Donald T. Kinsella for his willingness to return to public service so that this vacancy could be filled with a qualified, experienced former prosecutor, and for his years of distinguished work on behalf of the citizens of the Northern District of New York."
That's not a thank-you note. That's a marker laid down — a federal court telling the executive branch, on the record, that the man it removed was qualified and that his appointment was lawful.
The Northern District of New York still doesn't have a U.S. Attorney. The vacancy that started this fight remains. And the constitutional question at the center of it — who fills the gap when the President doesn't — now sits in the open, waiting for someone to litigate it.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday that approximately 1.6 million illegal immigrants with final deportation orders are currently living in the United States — and roughly half of them have criminal convictions.
That's 800,000 people whom an immigration judge already ordered removed from the country, who broke the law again after arriving here illegally, and who remained anyway. The orders weren't issued by ICE or the Department of Homeland Security. They came from immigration judges within the Department of Justice — the judicial process that amnesty advocates constantly insist must be respected.
The process spoke. Nobody enforced it.
According to Fox News, Lyons broke the numbers down further during questioning from Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., offering a state-level snapshot that sharpens the national picture. In Minnesota alone — a state that has become a flashpoint for clashes over immigration enforcement — Lyons testified that there are 16,840 individuals with final deportation orders at large.
"There's 16,840 final orders at large in the state of Minnesota."
Minnesota. One state. Nearly 17,000 people, a judge told to leave, who simply didn't. Multiply that pattern across fifty states, and you begin to understand how 1.6 million becomes not a statistic but a systemic failure — one that previous administrations chose to tolerate.
Lyons made clear that these deportation orders were issued through the legal system's own channels:
"Through an immigration judge with the Department of Justice separate from Immigration Customs Enforcement."
This distinction matters. Every time critics accuse the administration of acting unilaterally or bypassing due process, the answer is sitting in 1.6 million case files. These people received hearings. They received orders. The system rendered its judgment. What was missing — for years — was anyone willing to carry it out.
Lankford used his time to connect the current enforcement challenge to the open-border conditions that created it. The senator's testimony painted a picture of a border that functionally ceased to exist:
"Two years ago, we had 10,000 people a day illegally crossing into the country, two years ago, 10,000 people a day not vetted, had no idea who they were."
Ten thousand a day. That's not immigration — it's capitulation dressed up as compassion.
Lankford went further, citing the Biden administration's own estimates on one of the most alarming categories of border crossers:
"70,000 people were estimated by the Biden administration to come in in 2024 that were special interest aliens that had a locational connection to terrorism."
The Biden administration knew. Its own estimates flagged 70,000 individuals entering the country with ties to regions connected to terrorism — and the border remained open. Lankford drove the point home:
"But we had no idea who they were. They were allowed to be able to come into the country two years ago."
This is the inheritance. Not a policy disagreement. Not a difference in emphasis. A security catastrophe that the previous administration documented in its own data and then chose to ignore.
While ICE agents work to execute the deportation orders that judges issued — in some cases years ago — they face an increasingly hostile environment on the ground. Two activists, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, died in altercations with federal officers in Minnesota, incidents that have fueled protests against enforcement operations.
Lankford addressed the nature of those protests directly, describing a pattern that goes well beyond peaceful dissent:
"There are thousands of arrests that are happening in a day that are happening by the book. And what's happening is a group of protesters that are protesting and agitating, and some of them running into churches and disturbing church services and saying, 'It's my First Amendment right to shut down your church during a service.' And saying they're a peaceful protester while they throw rocks at agents, it just gets old."
There's a particular kind of audacity in invoking the First Amendment to disrupt someone else's worship — then throwing rocks at federal agents and calling it a peaceful protest. The contradiction doesn't need commentary. It speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, Democrats have threatened to defund DHS unless the agency changes its enforcement approach. The logic is remarkable: the judicial system issued 1.6 million deportation orders, agents are finally executing them, and the response from the left is to strip funding from the agency doing the work the courts demanded.
Lankford closed his remarks by acknowledging the men and women doing the actual work of enforcement — the agents operating under threat, executing lawful orders in communities where local politicians and activist groups treat them as the enemy.
"The work that the men and women that work around you have done have stopped that chaos."
He also offered a broader observation that deserves to echo beyond the committee room:
"We're losing perspective of what's really happened."
He's right. The national conversation has drifted so far from the underlying reality that enforcing a judge's order now gets treated as authoritarian overreach. A country that cannot remove people its own courts have ordered deported is not exercising compassion — it's advertising that its laws mean nothing.
There are 1.6 million tests of that proposition sitting in the United States right now. Eight hundred thousand of them have criminal records. The question was never whether enforcement would be difficult. The question is whether a nation that refuses to enforce its own judicial orders can still call itself a nation of laws.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spent this week on a media tour — not to discuss the weighty constitutional questions sitting on her desk, but to defend her night out at the Grammy Awards and promote her memoir.
Jackson appeared on "CBS Mornings" on Feb. 10 and ABC's "The View" on Feb. 11, where she defended attending the Grammy ceremony this month as a nominee for the audio version of her 2025 book "Lovely One." She did not win. The Dalai Lama took the award for best audio book, narration, and storytelling recording.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court still has not issued a ruling on President Trump's tariffs — a case argued back in November — and has decided only one of the other eight cases from that same oral arguments session. The court is currently in the middle of a four-week break from hearing arguments and issuing opinions.
The issue isn't that a Supreme Court justice attended an awards show. The issue is which awards show, and what happened there.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., laid it out plainly, according to USA Today: many attendees at the ceremony wore "ICE OUT" pins, and two award winners used their acceptance speeches to denounce the Trump administration's immigration enforcement. Blackburn called it:
"Such a brazenly political, anti-law enforcement event."
Jackson, seated in that audience, is part of the court currently deliberating a major case on presidential authority. The optics aren't complicated. A justice who will rule on the legality of the president's enforcement powers attended an event where enforcement of immigration law was treated as something to protest — accessorized with lapel pins, no less.
On "The View," Jackson waved it off. She described the evening in glowing terms:
"It was extraordinary. I'd never been to any kind of event like that before."
When pressed on the criticism, she framed attendance as part of her duties:
"Another part of the job, actually my job, is public outreach and education. I thought this is a great opportunity to highlight my work in this ways and to see what's happening at the Grammy's."
Public outreach. At the Grammys. While your pending caseload includes whether the president can use emergency powers to impose tariffs.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg rushed to Jackson's defense, arguing that the justice "had no way of knowing what anyone's speech was going to be." Jackson agreed:
"That's right."
Fine. She didn't know what the speeches would say. But she also didn't leave. She didn't issue any statement distancing herself from the politicized spectacle. She went on two talk shows afterward and described the evening as "extraordinary."
On "CBS Mornings," Jackson addressed the still-pending tariffs case with the kind of reassurance that sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than a few seconds:
"The court is going through its process of deliberation. The American people expect for us to be thorough and clear in our determinations and sometimes that takes time."
Thoroughness is a virtue. But the court heard oral arguments on these tariffs in November. It's now mid-February. They've managed to resolve exactly one of the nine cases argued that month. The tariffs — which function as a centerpiece of the president's economic agenda and a major foreign policy tool — remain in legal limbo.
During those November arguments, many justices sounded skeptical that the president can tap emergency powers to sidestep the standard tariffs process. That skepticism, combined with the glacial pace, has fueled speculation that the court is in no rush to invalidate a sitting president's signature economic policy — preferring to let the clock run rather than issue a politically explosive ruling.
That's a choice. And it's a choice that has consequences for American businesses, trading partners, and the broader economy every single day it goes unresolved.
There's a deeper pattern worth noting. Jackson is not the first justice to have a public life outside the court. Justices write books. They give speeches. They attend events. None of that is inherently problematic.
But the left spent years demanding that conservative justices recuse themselves from cases based on the flimsiest associations — a flag on a neighbor's lawn, attendance at a legal conference, a friendship with someone tangentially connected to a litigant. The standard they set was that even the appearance of bias was disqualifying.
Now, a liberal justice attends an event where performers and attendees openly protested federal law enforcement, where anti-ICE sentiment was literally pinned to people's chests — and the defense is that she couldn't have predicted the speeches. The recusal industrial complex that targeted conservative justices has gone remarkably quiet.
Jackson also used her Grammy loss to charm the talk show audience:
"If you're going to lose, I mean, you might as well lose to the Dalai Lama, for sure."
It's a good line. It's the kind of thing that plays well on daytime television. And that's precisely the concern — a sitting Supreme Court justice who seems more comfortable on a talk show couch than behind the bench, building a media persona while cases of national significance collect dust.
Jackson described her Grammy attendance and media appearances as "public outreach and education." She called the criticism itself just:
"Part of the job."
But there's a difference between public engagement and a publicity tour. Promoting a young adult version of your memoir on "The View" while the country waits for a ruling on presidential trade authority isn't outreach. It's branding.
The Supreme Court's authority rests on the perception that its members are above the political fray — that they deliberate with care, speak through opinions, and let their work product do the talking. Every appearance on a daytime talk show, every photo op at an awards ceremony dripping with partisan signaling, chips away at that perception.
Jackson has every right to attend the Grammys. She has every right to go on television. But rights and wisdom aren't the same thing. The American people waiting on a tariffs ruling might prefer their justices spent February working — not explaining why losing to the Dalai Lama was actually kind of fun.
Molly Wasow Park, the commissioner of New York City's Department of Social Services, resigned this week after learning she would not be retained by Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration. The departure — barely a month into Mamdani's tenure — signals that the new mayor's team has wasted little time finding fault with the agency tasked with managing the city's sprawling homelessness and social welfare apparatus.
Park acknowledged her exit on Monday, telling reporters the role she had hoped to keep simply wasn't going to materialize. Two people familiar with the circumstances confirmed she was told she would not be retained. A third anonymous source corroborated the account.
The timing is notable. Eighteen New Yorkers have died after exposure to the elements during a recent stretch of extreme cold, with the first death occurring on January 24. Park is still scheduled to testify before the City Council about those deaths — even as she packs her desk.
Mamdani and his senior aides had already begun reconsidering the direction and leadership of the Department of Social Services before the cold-weather deaths made headlines, the New York Times reported. First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan reportedly shared concerns about Park's stewardship, with the mayor's team concluding the agency was not adequately addressing the needs of what they described as an "economically unstable population."
That phrase does a lot of heavy lifting without saying much. New York City's homelessness problem is not new, not mysterious, and not the result of insufficient bureaucratic compassion. The city has spent billions on shelter systems, transitional housing, and social programs. The question isn't whether officials care enough. It's whether the machinery they've built actually works.
Park herself seemed to acknowledge the limits of what her agency accomplished. In an interview, she offered this:
"When the final evaluation happens, I'm sure there's going to be instances where we find instances where we could have done something different. I feel like in an awful lot of cases, we did what we needed to."
That's the kind of self-assessment that sounds reasonable in a conference room and hollow on a sidewalk where someone froze to death.
Park was appointed by former Mayor Eric Adams in 2023, replacing Gary Jenkins, who resigned that same year over his handling of the city's homelessness situation. She inherited a department already buckling — at the time, the city was scrambling to shelter thousands of migrants arriving every week while still dealing with the economic and social wreckage of pandemic-era policies.
Now she's gone too, and the pattern is unmistakable. New York cycles through social services commissioners the way other cities cycle through school superintendents: a new face, a new set of promises, the same intractable problems, and an eventual resignation that gets framed as a mutual decision.
Mayor Mamdani's spokeswoman, Dora Pekec, issued the requisite diplomatic statement:
"We appreciate Commissioner Park's years of service to the city and the mayor looks forward to working with her through this transitional period."
City Hall added it would name a replacement "in the coming weeks."
Since the cold snap began, the city says it made more than 1,400 placements into shelters or other indoor sites and involuntarily removed 34 people from the streets. Those numbers tell two stories at once.
On one hand, 1,400 placements suggest the system was working at scale to get people indoors. On the other hand, 18 people still died. And the involuntary removal of just 34 people — out of a homeless population that numbers in the tens of thousands — raises an obvious question about whether the city's legal and political framework even allows officials to act decisively when lives are at stake.
Park, for her part, suggested the city should spend more time understanding why homeless individuals refuse shelter in the first place:
"We need to spend more time as a society asking what got people to this sense of trauma and dislocation, that they would rather stay on the street."
It's a sentiment that sounds compassionate. It's also the kind of open-ended inquiry that can justify inaction indefinitely. At some point, the question stops being "why won't they come inside?" and starts being "why won't the city bring them inside?" New York's progressive establishment has spent years insisting that individual autonomy — even the autonomy to freeze — trumps intervention. The 18 dead are the cost of that philosophy.
The deeper story here isn't one commissioner's departure. It's what Mamdani intends to do differently — and whether his instincts will run toward more of the same.
Park had pushed to use rental vouchers to help finance affordable housing developments, a policy direction that sounds innovative until you consider that New York has layered voucher program upon voucher program for decades without solving the underlying housing crisis. The city doesn't have a voucher shortage. It has a housing supply problem driven by zoning restrictions, regulatory burdens, and construction costs that make affordable development nearly impossible without massive public subsidy.
If Mamdani's team forced Park out because they want a commissioner who will pursue even more aggressive progressive interventions — more spending, more programs, more studies about "trauma and dislocation" — then the revolving door will keep spinning. The next commissioner will inherit the same broken system, face the same structural constraints, and eventually sit for the same exit interview.
Councilwoman Crystal Hudson, who chairs the Council's general welfare committee, praised Park as a partner in the work of getting people off the streets:
"[A] steadfast partner in the hard work of getting people off the streets and into permanent homes."
Steadfast, perhaps. But 18 people are dead, a commissioner is out, and the agency is leaderless heading into what remains of winter.
Park insisted the cold-snap deaths played no role in her decision to leave, and that she felt no pressure from City Hall. The anonymous sources tell a different story — that she was effectively told her time was up. Both versions may contain partial truth, but only one matters: the person responsible for the city's social services safety net during the deadliest cold stretch in recent memory is walking away, and no one in city government is willing to say plainly why.
That's the real failure. Not one commissioner's tenure, but a political culture where accountability gets laundered through anonymous sources and polite statements about "transitional periods." Eighteen New Yorkers froze. Someone should have to own that sentence out loud.
Instead, New York gets what it always gets — a new name on the door and the quiet expectation that next winter will somehow be different.